High quality and free book resources on Enterprise 2.0

The first chapter of Andrew McAfee's new book, Enterprise 2.0: New Collaborative Tools for your Organization’s Toughest Challenges, has been made available for free by Harvard Business School Press. All you need to do is register your name and email address with the publisher.

I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but the first chapter is downloaded and waiting for some time. You can register and download here.

The blurb for McAfee's new book is as follows:

"Web 2.0" is the portion of the Internet that's interactively produced by many people; it includes Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, Delicious, and prediction markets. In just a few years, Web 2.0 communities have demonstrated astonishing levels of innovation, knowledge accumulation, collaboration, and collective intelligence.

Now, leading organizations are bringing the Web's novel tools and philosophies inside, creating Enterprise 2.0. In this book, Andrew McAfee shows how they're doing this, and why it's benefiting them. Enterprise 2.0 makes clear that the new technologies are good for much more than just socializing-when properly applied, they help businesses solve pressing problems, capture dispersed and fast-changing knowledge, highlight and leverage expertise, generate and refine ideas, and harness the wisdom of crowds.

Most organizations, however, don't find it easy or natural to use these new tools initially. And executives see many possible pitfalls associated with them. Enterprise 2.0 explores these concerns, and shows how business leaders can overcome them.

McAfee brings together case studies and examples with key concepts from economics, sociology, computer science, consumer psychology, and management studies and presents them all in a clear, accessible, and entertaining style. Enterprise 2.0 is a must-have resource for all C-suite executives seeking to make technology decisions that are simultaneously powerful, popular, and pragmatic.

As you'll likely know, Andrew McAfee is the guy who coined the term "Enterprise 2.0". His work (including his blog) is often a great read, and his video presentation and live Q&A at the 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Executive forum was a highlight of the event.

That memory brings me nicely on to another superb Enterprise 2.0 resource that you can find online, and one that I've been meaning to link to for a while.

Ross Dawson's recently published Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report is available in hard copy from Amazon (and as business reports go it's a work of art), while a good deal of the content has been published online. The free chapters include the implementation framework, a chapter on Governance, and more. The full outline is as follows:

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 technologies and approaches can be a key driver of competitiveness and profitability.

However since Enterprise 2.0 sits at the nexus of technology and organizational culture, there can be no one-size-fits-all approach.

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Report provides detailed practical insights into how to create substantial business value with web technologies, supported by numerous case studies of successful implementation and lessons learned.

If not already consumed and you're keen on keeping up to date with the latest thinking on this topic, then these two resources should be high on your reading list, and it's great to be able to see a good portion of them online before you order the whole schebang.