Digital Businesses: Creation of a Research Framework for Organizational Readiness for Enterprise 2.0

Abstract

Customers are no longer at the receiving end in the new digital economies. They have a say in everything and are co-creating products and services. Their connection with other customers is stronger and the influence they exert collectively on businesses is phenomenal. All this has been made possible by the technologies that the collaborative internet has made possible. Businesses have discarded hierarchies and functional pyramid structures in favor of flat empowered structures to improve decision responsiveness in the new age. Competency is fast replacing compatibility amongst successful employees. Geography is dead and interactions take place across boundaries of distance, time, language and culture. This transformation of the business enterprise to Enterprise 2.0 has become possible due to the use of Web 2.0 tools becoming common place and has had far reaching implications. The question that it raises is that are all organizations equally well equipped to take advantage of these changes or is it going to change the relative power equation amongst them to make some small forward looking technology savvy organizations suddenly more powerful than the erstwhile successful large giants who had built themselves on the strength of their products and markets over time. This paper aims at creating a framework that can help evaluate this emerging equation and assess the state of readiness of all organizations to meet this onslaught of business change. The framework addresses these technologies, the way they are impacting business strategy and spells out all that organizations need to do to be able to gear up to face the changing fabric of the new age enterprise.