“No longer new, Web 2.0 technologies solve problems that enterprises have today — but most have not yet used these tools to anywhere near their potential. Waiting for tools to mature seems prudent, but if you wait too long, employees may create their own collaborative environments on the Web. Timing your next move requires you to track the maturity of enterprise Web 2.0 technologies. In a careful examination of the marketplace and trends for enterprise Web 2.0 tools, we reveal that organizations find wikis valuable, forums stable (though underutilized), and report mixed success with blogs. Enterprise social networking tools stand ready to redefine workplace collaboration, adding new value to your organization’s content by associating it with peers and experts.”

Unfortunately at the moment we see different approaches to this matter, as companies are getting closer to Enterprise 2.0 tickled from various directions. Most of them don’t have a clear idea of what Enterprise 2.0 really means, thinking that it’s all about using the same social tools we use in our private life into the enterprise.

Geek & Poke

Enterprise 2.0 it’s not about bringing Facebook in our company, it’s about understanding what is great about Facebook and what can be replicated and ported in the enterprise world. It’s about recognizing the power of collaboration and the “human network“, that can be leveraged by the use of software that allow people to connect easily and faster, sharing ideas, thoughts and contents.

Often when you start looking inside a company’s “formal network” of relations and then you track down knowledge flow, you discover that the real “human network” that gets things done is very different from the formal one. You unveil who, inside the company or department, is the “knowledge repository” for the whole group, the one everybody trusts and respect which, often, is not in the right place, or doesn’t have the appropriate formal role.

So, applying Enterprise 2.0 means going trough a path of innovation of collaboration and human relationships, prior to start talking tech. If the company is not willing to follow such a path, installing Enterprise 2.0 tools is completely useless.

Fortunately some companies have grasped what Enterprise 2.0 leads to (better collaboration and communication), but still don’t know how this happens, what tools to use and where to start.

Geek & Poke

I usually recommend to do a process study, allow the “2.0 people” to observe day by day activity at the customer’s office, watching closely what the processes are and how things are generally get done. Once we have grasped what happens inside the company, is then possible to think about ways to improve it.

Usually the most common choices are collaboration software that allow people to share in real time data and information about the projects they are involved into. I find extremely powerful the shift from a category-based information architecture, that organizes items in formal categories, to a dynamic object-based architecture where tags are assigned to items that can now belong to different areas at the same time.

Clicking on a tag allow us to see all items connected to that matter, regardless of the item nature or domain. Clearly this means that people have to learn how to tag properly and how to search within tags, but once grasped this workflow collaboration get much easier.

Another interesting tool are wikis. Instead of sending and receiving endless emails with attachments that bounce from one colleague to another, creating duplicates and mistakes, is much easier to let people go to the document and not vice versa.

Collaborative editing is all about this, going to an online location to edit a multi author document, such as an estimate or a white paper. People can now edit their part and their changes are immediately visible to the other authors, that can behave accordingly. Wikis are also great tools to aggregate the informal knowledge that lives inside a company, speeding up training processes for new employees and creating a useful repository for the whole company.

Enterprise 2.0 is really only about having a positive attitude towards collaboration and, in general, the people we have in our office. Technologies only enable us to collaborate better, but the most important thing is the will to share and engage the people that work for and with us. (So, please, don’t behave like this guy when you decide to jump on the Entperprise 2.0 thing).

Geek & Poke