The Web 2.0 Evolution: McKinsey Quarterly Interviews MIT’s Andrew McAfee

It's been a frequent theme on this blog space that conventionalism doesn't take into account how the world has been transitioning from the post-industrial age to the information age.

This video interview of MIT's Andrew McAfee by McKinsey Quarterly "How Web 2.0 is changing the way we work"deals with such transformation.

According to McKinsey Quarterly,

``In recent years, using technology to change the way people work has often meant painful disruption, as CIOs rolled enterprise software programs through the ranks of reluctant staffers. Today, employees are more likely to bring in new technologies on their own—and to do so enthusiastically—through their Web browser, whether it’s starting a blog, setting up a wiki to share knowledge, or collaborating on documents hosted online. Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist at the Center for Digital Business at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been watching this shift closely. His new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, explores the ways that leading organizations are bringing Web 2.0 tools inside. McAfee calls these tools “emergent social software platforms”—highly visible environments with tools that evolve as people use them—and he is optimistic about their potential to improve the way we work.

``McAfee spoke with McKinsey’s Roger Roberts, a principal in the Silicon Valley office, in Palo Alto, California, in October 2009.

Andrew McAfee: ``One of my initial assumptions was after looking at the Web, you see the phenomenal growth of things like Facebook and Wikipedia and Flickr and YouTube and all that. I thought these technologies were essentially so cool that when you dropped them in an organization, people flocked to them. That was the assumption I carried around in my research.

``I very quickly had that overturned. And in fact what you see is—particularly for longer tenured workers, particularly for older workers—this is a big shift for them, changing their current work practices and moving over to Enterprise 2.0. This is not an overnight phenomenon at all. And while there are pockets of energy, getting mass adoption remains a pretty serious challenge for a lot of organizations." (Things do change at the margins-Benson)

If video doesn't appear pls proceed to McKinsey's website here.

The Transcript of the interview here