McKinsey has posted a recent interview with MIT's Andrew McAfee on Enterprise 2.0 adoption. McAfee recently published a book called Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges so, as you might expect, he has a generally favorable take on the subject.

When many advocates are quick to say that new technologies are "changing the way we work" it's refreshing to see McAfee's perspective on Web 2.0 techniques, which is decidedly the other way around: they allow us to work the way we want to work. When you consider technology from this perspective, it's easier to see that for much of the history of information technology, it's actually been getting in the way of what feels right to do. Web 2.0 has come from the bottom up and represents a design that responds more to what we want to do to get our work done than one that represents yet another new paradigm that we're supposed to adopt to take advantage of the latest and greatest technology. McAfee has a couple of anecdotes that illustrate that nicely, and also remind us that Web 2.0 only works when the users want it to work.

That also could sum up his other important insight in the interview regarding how best to implement Web 2.0 in the enterprise. In the debate between top-down versus bottom-up implementations, he strikes a nice middle ground that better reflects the realities of using Web 2.0. Without some effort from both ends, finding success in these implementations is extremely difficult.

The quandry this creates for the CIO does not go unnoticed, either. While nodding toward the traditional risk-management role that CIOs have been expected to play, McAfee points out that you're unlikely to continue in that role much longer if you insist on viewing these new technologies as risks. Although counter-intuitive, it's becoming increasingly clear to me that many of these seemingly off-the-cuff implementations are less risky than the traditional IT mega-project to which CIOs have been so attached. Advocates of Agile Operations, "devops", and lean techniques are increasingly assembling evidence that small, fast, and limited can pay off with less risk than large and well-funded. Web 2.0 roll-outs lend themselves to these techniques, and little is lost should they fail.

In the past, I've found McAfee a bit quick to advocate ideas based more on anecdotes than statistics, and there is certainly a hint of that in this interview. While that is hardly unique among bloggers and pundits, there is a certain weight that comes when you put "MIT Research Scientist" next to your name, and I have higher expectations from anyone who does so. In this instance I happen to agree with pretty much everything he says, but then, I'm not a research scientist at MIT.