Dion Hinchcliffe is leading an opening workshop on Implementing Enterprise 2.0. I have long been an admirer of his work and was pleased to see this session. The subtitle is: Exploring the Tools and Techniques of Emergent Change. Dion said the concept of emergent and social is critical. I like the fact that many stories will be offered as I agree that they offer more than “factual” information. I did this real time so apologies for typos. This is cross-posted from FastForward.
Dion said that many companies do not like the word, social. so he uses enterprise 2.0. Again, I agree here. I wish the Wikipedia did. Three years ago only a few in his session had access to blogs at work. Last year it was half. This year it was almost everyone. Enterprise 2.0 is more about social tools for collaboration than in the consumer space. Most organization have these tools but it is every uneven.
Consumer and enterprise is blurring. Employees now put contact information in social tools outside the enterprise as something they own and can take with them. People are willing to pay for these tools themselves but most are free. We had to move to a much bigger room as there were a lot of people here. I could have predicted that. I look around and still see people standing.
In 2004 Web 2.0 tools began to be used at work. This is when I learned about them and got excited about their impact on knowledge management. Middle of last year global surveys in developed nations found about a third of all companies had the enterprise tools. Now it is a bit over half. Dion mentioned that knowledge management was an early use. Now Twitter is on the rise. It is social messaging as opposed to instant messaging. There is little interest in IM now as it does not build value because it operates in silos. I never liked IM and would sometimes copy and paste IM messages in Word before they went away. Now Twitter needs to get its archiving working better but at least there is some.
There are hundreds of enterprise 2.0 pilot projects underway. Mid to small businesses are most successful because they are nimble. Big software players are getting into it. Google Wave is designed to serve in this space. There are dozens of startups. Traditional tools like Documentum are adding enterprise 2.0 features. I did a review of this in AppGap (see EMC Documentum Makes a Series of Moves into Enterprise 2.0).
The big money principle of Enterprise 2.0 is harnessing collective intelligence. Tools have been poor for this before. He has seen 400 page Word docs with best practices. Tim O’Reilly definition, “Network applications that explicitly leverage network effects.” This is the social side of information. It is not just making connections but making use of it. Network effect occurs when the more people who use it, the better it is. YouTube is an example. Gave example of enterprise use of taking a free wiki tool inside informally at AOL. It spread virally until the entire organization uses it instead of traditional document management system. The wiki was optimizes for network effect. The traditional document management system was not optimized for this and lost out.
Andy McAffee put forth three pillars of enterprise 2.0: emergent, freeform, social. They are primarily to address collaboration challenge. Capture institutional knowledge and make it discoverable. It is globally visible, persistent collaboration that has very low barrier to entry. Like open source, anyone can improve knowledge. Workers are put into the central place for contribution. Tools adapt to environment rather than the reverse. In studies of early adopters social tools get much greater use for knowledge management than traditional tools. There is also less duplication of effort, increased transparency, and higher levels of productivity.
Dion used stales acronym – search, links, authorship, tags, extensions, signals - as critical components. Tags provide emergent structure and standard use of terms. I found that the users of taxonomy are the best at creating it. Now we have the way for this to happen. These tools will interrupt workflow less. Dion said this is a critical point and I agree. The other is that the content can be leveraged as the content is persistent and discoverable. I see this as knowledge management as a byproduct of work and not a separate activity. This is what got me excited about Web 2.0 for business in 2004.
Now we have a break so I will post this first part. More later.
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