Rivals Face Off In Enterprise 2.0 DebateRivals Face Off In Enterprise 2.0 Debate

McAfee proposed that Web 2.0 technologies could actually threaten the hierarchical structure and bureaucratic lines that have long been the corporate skeleton.

Enabling workers to voice their opinions and possibly even make sensitive corporate problems or issues public is something executives need to think through, warned both men.

For "enlightened leaders," allowing workers to blog and use wikis could be a way to tap into new energies and new ideas, said McAfee. "Leaders want to build empires out there on the market. Bureaucrats want to build turf," he added. "If you want to protect your turf inside an organization, these are unfriendly tools to you."

It's not that easy, though, in the real business world where companies live and die on reputations and disenfranchised workers like to publicly vent their gripes, countered Davenport. "It's unrealistic to think that people who have power will surrender to people who have no power and think they're doing a bad job and want to blog about it," he said.

McAfee, however, shot back that if employees have something real to gripe about, a good leader would want to know about it.

"It's a question of whether people senior enough in an organization want that information to percolate upward," he said. "These are good tools for those owners ... who want to look under the rocks for where the unpleasant truths are. I'd deploy an Enterprise 2.0 infrastructure to see what people inside it are saying."

Davenport said the idea of giving employees more of a voice isn't new and there long have been techniques, if not technology, to enable it. Want to know what a worker is thinking, put up a suggestion box, he said. And if a company, for instance, were to enable all 20,000 people to blog, who would read those blogs and make sure the company was using the best ideas and taking care of the problems that were coming up? It's simply unmanageable.

"I keep looking at the organizations that are adopting these technologies to see what exactly they're being used for," said Davenport. "There was an article in Fortune about organizations that have established Facebook groups in pretty large numbers. It didn't say what people are using them for. ... I think they'll be used for social purposes far more than for business purposes. I think it's clear that if you have friends at work, the company will be more likely to retain you. ... Is that enough?"

For McAfee that is at least a great start.

"Why do you have to draw such a bright line?" he asked. "That distinction didn't occur to me. I just use Facebook. That's great. Business and social -- why does it have to be one or the other? Why wouldn't we want people to have that idea when they collaborate? Let's give them these tools and have some faith that they'll use them to do their jobs."