Forrester recently sent me a review copy of their 30 page report - Forrester TechRadar™ For I&KM Pros: Enterprise Web 2.0 - Wikis And Social Networks Are Ready To Deliver High Value To Your Enterprise, Q4 2008 by Gil Yehuda with Kyle McNabb, G. Oliver Young, Sara Burnes, Zachary Reiss-Davis. The major areas of focus and conclusions are similar to Forrester TechRadar For Vendor Strategists: Enterprise Web 2.0 - How Product Strategists Should Approach A Maturing Web 2.0 Market, Q4 2008 which should be no surprise. However, this reports is targeting the issues faced by KM professionals.
I have written on a number of occasions that the advent of enterprise 2.0 proivder knowledge management professionals with a great opportunity to play a leadership role in their organizations. This reports provides useful guidance on the some actions that KM people might take. It begins with some of options the organizations face.
On one hand, waiting for IT to provide approved Web 2.0 tools leads to competitive disadvantage. On the other hand, using the tools available externally puts information at risk. In addition, downloading and running Web 2.0 tools on internal servers increase IT headaches. I have argued before, as other have, that Web 2.0 is not enterprise 2.0. I agree with the report that none of these options are good ones. Within the enterprise you need to adopt tools that were designed for business use within the enterprise. Some of these tools can be cloud based but they also need to be business based.
They picked the same 11 technologies studied in the vendor report: blogs, forums, mashups, microblogs, podcasts, prediction markets, RSS, social bookmarks, social networks, widgets, and wikis and offered the same conclusions about the tools. Then the report goes on to provide advice to KM professionals in light of these conclusions. The main one are:
“Set your expectations: Web 2.0 technology will improve the business, but not transform it…Experiment with social networking tools. At a minimum, ensure that Web 2.0 deployments clearly connect content to the employees associated with that content… wait for microblogging to mature before jumping on the latest craze. Microblogs may offset email and regular blogs. Variations of the “What are you working on?” status question will be part of new social and presence engines. But microblogging will only become valuable to the enterprise once it truly integrates with other enterprise processes and applications, and only after a whole set of additional tools are added to help filter content and refine the value of aggregated information.”
In backing up the first advice statement, researchers said that, “no one we surveyed pointed to any one tool as “must have,” although many found significant value in wikis and forums.” I guess I have been talking more to vendors that KM people as I have seen examples where enterprise 2.0 tools have, at least, transformed business process to provide greater transparency, accountability, and thus productivity. On the other hand, in talking with a few implementers, they have not yet seen the big wave of demand for enterprise 2.0 tools. So I think the answer is somewhere in the middle here. I would agree to not over-sell.
I completely agree with the second advice statement. You need to take advantage of these two tools to bring out the social side of content. I also agree with the last statement but I think the preconditions for making microblogging useful will appear sooner than later. For example, I recently talked with Jordan frank at Traction who showed me their new microblogging tool that is completely integrated into their wiki platform with such feature as permission levels, search, and tags. It can be become part of a community page and team collaboration space.
If you are a KM professional who wants to play a leadership role in the implementation of enterprise 2.0, this report will provide useful explanations and guidance. There is a lot of detail here.
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