How 1.5 is Greater than 2.0

July 9, 2009 · · Posted by Jordan Frank

I found Tom Davenport's discussion of Why 1.5 is Greater than 2.0 by way of Bill Ives in Mixing Old and New School Communication. Davenport talks about the social reasons in favor of a blend between social and traditional approaches. I think an answer to How 1.5, in this context, is Greater than 2.0 is both social and structural.

The Social Side of 1.5

Reinforcing the social example, Davenport says that when seeking therapy "You'd listen to what the medical establishment prescribes for your ailment, but you'd probably also check out blogs, wikis, and other patient-generated content and communities."

This cuts to the social issue where the Health 2.0 social community of patients augments the Health 1.0 information infrastructure born out of research and fact finding.

The "Web 1.0" approach in this context is, like traditional media, a (more or less) trusted system. Non-traditional news sources and blogs that don't have as much editorial oversight and don't have stringent guidelines for validation serve a social role by calling out traditional media while traditional media also serves as a validation backstop for rumor that could otherwise overwhelm social media.

The Structural Side of 1.5

The evolution of the Web 2.0 and it's Enterprise 2.0 counterpart is fascinating as the social and structural components reinforce eachother.

From a structural perspective, the "web 1.0" approach picked up where "KM 1.0" fell down. With a traditional taxonomic approach to organizing information, the web would be a different (and less useful) environment altogether.

That a flat, disorganized web of pages and links published by people operating independently could outperform a well planned information infrastructure was shocking to many but is a clear and obvious outcome.

In the "Web 2.0" scenario, blogs (and blog like systems like twitter) add more pages, more links and a timeline to the web. This just reinforces and improves upon the Web 1.0 structure.

Enterprises will lag as most haven't even gotten from KM 1.0 to Web 1.0 information approaches, but hopefully they can make up for it when deploying E2.0 in force. While doing so, a key takeaway for enterprises here is following a plan that relinquishes control while mixing "blog" conversation, "wiki" knowledge product, and ample opportunities to link and annotate enterprise information resources such as ERP, CRM, PLM and HR systems.

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