Introduction
During the last decade, industry and scholarly communities have equally highlighted the importance of managing organisational knowledge and posited that intangible assets form a critical enterprise resource asset (Metaxiotis et al., 2005; Davenport and Prusak, 1998). Knowledge management has been previously associated with the exploitation and growth of the organisational knowledge assets (Davenport and Prusak, 1998) aiming at increased operational efficiency and continuous time-to-market improvement. Yet, recent developments associate knowledge strategies with the ability of the organisation to explore and identify critical changes of the external operating environment, ultimately renewing its internal knowledge base and core competencies (Bhatt et al., 2005). Hence, the mere existence of strong organisational resources and capabilities appear to be inadequate for obtaining long-term sustainable competitive advantage.
The term “Enterprise 2.0” promptly followed the widespread of the so-called “Web 2.0” and dominated the discourse surrounding the utilisation of business concepts in relation not only to enterprise information applications, but also to associated managerial approaches related to our post-industrial age (Bughin, 2008; Hamel, 2007). The use of the decimal point in the term implies a proposed discontinuity from previous forms of organisational contextures, emphasising on a suggested transformative role of social computing inside companies (e.g. wikis, blogs, podcasts, RSS (Really Simple Syndication), Instant Messaging, social bookmarking, etc) (McAfee, 2006). Now, there is a heated debate between sceptics who argue that the term “Enterprise 2.0” has nothing to offer other than basic managerial selections regarding the utilisation of generic networked business applications (Stenmark, 2008), while supporters claim that the term conveys something new: a flexible and adaptable perspective to organisational knowledge strategies (Bibikas et al., 2008; Ip & Wagner, 2008; Kosonen & Kianto, 2008; Marfleet, 2008; Patrick & Dotsika, 2007; Coakes, 2006; McAfee, 2006) and a key driver towards the development of dynamic capabilities (Shuen, 2008). Has Enterprise 2.0 some actual meaning or the term should just be approached metaphorically? In this paper, we explore whether Enterprise 2.0 can provide strategic business value affecting key knowledge processes and adaptive capabilities of organizations.
The remaining of this chapter is structured in five parts: The first presents the research approach and study methodology. The next section explores knowledge exploitation and knowledge exploration strategies through the lens of dynamic capabilities theory. The third part presents some of the main characteristics of Enterprise 2.0 and investigates the potential of social software in the future of organisational information and knowledge management systems. We argue that these technologies can help towards the integration of exploitation and exploration knowledge strategies. The fourth session presents secondary data from the utilisation of enterprise social computing tools inside two multinational companies. Finally, suggestions and managerial implications are presented along with future research directions.