Thought provoking article on the applications of Web 2.0 internally (sometimes called Enterprise 2.0) vs Externally…
I know how heretical this may sound, but is social media outside the firewall truly productive? I guess I can guess some of the answers in terms of wisdom of clouds, tapping into the mindset of consumers and turning that into lucrative products, niche marketing in the long long tail. But, does any of this actually generate wealth? In the firewall we create things and sell them, that’s the business model. Most of what goes on there is invisible. We want at least some privacy, and often we want a lot, confidentiality is important to any business – few, if none can be 100% transparent.
Which side of the firewall is hotter?
posted 17 August 2009 @ 22:20 by admin » 0 Comments
Extract form UseIt’s survey into social tools:
- Underground efforts yield big results. Companies are turning a blind eye to underground social software efforts until they prove their worth, and then sanctioning them within the enterprise.
- Frontline workers are driving the vision. Often, senior managers aren’t open to the possibilities for enterprise 2.0 innovation because they’re not actively using these tools outside of work. Indeed, many senior managers still consider such tools as something their kids do. One of the dirty secrets of enterprise 2.0 is that you don’t have to teach or convince younger workers to use these tools; they expect them and integrate them as easily into their work lives as they do in their personal lives.
- Communities are self-policing. When left to their own devices, communities police themselves, leaving very little need for tight organizational control. And such peer-to-peer policing is often more effective than a big brother approach. Companies that we studied said abuse was rare in their communities.
- Business need is the big driver. Although our report discusses specific tools (blogs, wikis, and such), enterprise 2.0’s power is not about tools, it’s about the communication shift that those tools enable.
- Organizations must cede power. Using Web 2.0 technologies to communicate with customers has taught many companies that they can no longer control the message. This also rings true when using Web 2.0 tools for internal communication. Companies that once held to a command-and-control paradigm for corporate messaging are finding it hard to maintain that stance.
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/social-intranet-features.html
posted 17 August 2009 @ 21:55 by admin » 0 Comments
In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life.
The program uses the same software behind the online encyclopedia Wikipedia and could potentially lead to hundreds of Army guides being “wikified.” The goal, say the officers behind the effort, is to tap more experience and advice from battle-tested soldiers rather than relying on the specialists within the Army’s array of colleges and research centers who have traditionally written the manuals.
“For a couple hundred years, the Army has been writing doctrine in a particular way, and for a couple months, we have been doing it online in this wiki,” said Col. Charles J. Burnett, the director of the Army’s Battle Command Knowledge System. “The only ones who could write doctrine were the select few. Now, imagine the challenge in accepting that anybody can go on the wiki and make a change — that is a big challenge, culturally.”
posted 17 August 2009 @ 15:51 by admin » 0 Comments
Enterprise social software is such an amorphous term; it means different things to different people and covers software that come from different heritages that are increasingly converging.
The Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) defines Enterprise 2.0 as “a system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise”. Does that make sense to you?
We’ve found it helpful to think about the needs that enterprise social software strives to meet. We call these the 3-c’s:
- Corporate memory – Don’t re-invent the wheel
- Collaboration – Help people work together on their stuff
- Communication – Share the stories
- BONUS: Customer engagement – Get closer to customers
Corporate memory
Traditionally a corporation’s technology systems capture only formal structured information. Using databases and Intranets these systems impose a heavy burden on the “imputters” of data. The barriers to capture of information are high, and the meta-data structures are unwieldy and unresponsive, so much of the useful informal information is never captured to start with. Enterprise social software helps to fill this hole. By encouraging self-publishing (blogs), people-driven categorisation (tagging), natural information organisation (wikis), and the capture of conversations (blogs, wikis, comments) a corporation builds a corporate memory that outlast the comings and goings of staff and management.
Collaboration
Project management is dead! Long live project collaboration. Social software helps to meet one of the main deficiencies of traditional project management tools, by moving the focus from task-driven to people-driven methodologies. Successful projects are successful when the teams “works”. Enterprise social software provides tools to let teams share their ideas (wikis), understand people’s strengths so the best resources can be rallied (wikis/messaging), write collaborative documents (wikis) and manage shared tasks more effectively (user friendly task managers).
Communication
Much of enterprise social software works to increase and facilitate better communication. This ranges from Instant messaging, Twitter-like messaging (see SocialText’s Signals, conferencing, RSS feeds. In fact, anthing that helps people communicate better, and outside the silos of traditional corporate structures.
Customer engagement
The bonus 4th c is Customer Engagement. We don’t usually include this in the same story, because the focus is clearly on marketing. However many of the same tools use for 3cs can also be deployed for Customer Engagement to create deeper engagement with customers.
Enterprise social software can be used in different areas of the marketing and sales cycle, from product research (blogs/private communities), mid-funnel engagement (forums/blogs) to post-sales support (wikis/communities). The best resource to understand the application of enterprise social software to customer engagement is Forrester’s Groundswell book.
If there is anything that unifies these different concepts, I think its that social software values people over process. Choosing the right software, will depend to a large extent on where your “people” needs lie.
posted 30 April 2009 @ 21:00 by admin » 0 Comments
We look at whether Microsoft Sharepoint could serve as an adequete enterprise level wiki. Our answer: Not yet.
Some of reasoning in support:
- Gartner Social Software Report 2008: Advises functional gaps exist with wiki and social tagging. Partners may be required to achieve a full solution.
- Sharepoint has come from a document management and Intranet legacy, and moves into wiki/social tools occurred only in 2007. Wikis are not the main game. Microsoft representatives admit that Sharepoint does not compete with the best wikis
- Sharepoint’s strengths are not in social tools eg. wikis (see this Article in CIO).
- The built-in Wiki is missing key enterprise features. Kwizcom (a Sharepoint Partner) market a Wiki+ product. They provide as useful list of the deficiencies in the Sharepoint wiki including: tagging, content templates, comments/discussions, wiki markup language, Email alerts for content changes.
- Philosophy: Are you are trying to use a Wiki to help drive cultural change to a more open and collaborative environment? Microsoft’s heritage is in command and control systems, and Sharepoint is designed to allow micro-level access/workflow approvals for content approval. You need to ask, Does Microsoft “get” social software?
- Costs: Licence costs are complex to calculate as they are dependant on existing MS Server and Office licences.
read more from "Can Sharepoint work as a wiki?"
posted 29 April 2009 @ 17:30 by admin » 0 Comments
When you roll out an Enterprise Wiki, you inevitably run into overlaps with functionality currently provided by the corporate Intranet.
This article looks at the process of determining what content is appropriate for the wiki.
An Enterprise Wiki and an Intranet built on a Content Management System have a lot in common:
- They are both web-based system; accessed via a browser.
- They both allow users to create and share pages, and attach documents, such as PDFs.
- Enterprise Wikis and Enterprise CMS systems have access control capabilities, allowing administrators to section off the site and allow different users rights to view and edit content.
- Modern versions of each allow for easy creation and editing of pages using Word-like rich text editors.
In the last few years we’ve also see a growing convergence between CMS and Enterprise Wiki functionality, with CMS systems such as MS Sharepoint adding tagging, wiki-markup and other social features, and Enterprise Wikis like Confluence adding advanced Access Control and version control for attached documents.
read more from "Wiki vs Intranet: What goes where?"
posted 22 April 2009 @ 1:16 by admin » 0 Comments
Social enterprise blog with a focus on enterprise wiki for improving communication, collaboration and knowledge management within enterprises. This is the personal blog of Richard Quinn.