Group items tagged

At the same time, a recent InformationWeek survey of IT departments are showing considerably wariness for doing the same thing inside the firewall with employees, with over half being either skeptical or wary of the utility of Web 2.0 apps in the enterprise.  The biggest concerns: Security, little expertise with Web 2.0 products, integration issues, and unclear ROI top the list.  In other words, the group inside most organizations that's most familiar with IT and software, is thinking carefully before deploying things like Enterprise 2.0. This is an interesting contrast, with a growing list of companies cautiously but clearly testing out the Web 2.0 waters with their customers while remaining largely on the fence for its use inside the enterprise.  Certainly, many organizations likely believe that consumer facing sites that extensively leverage user generated content, mass participation, and social networking have been proved to work on a large scale by sites like MySpace and YouTube.  And that organizations have already purchased and deployed countless IT tools that were already designed support internal business processes, ad hoc collaboration, and information capture and storage.    Another probably contributor to the increasing use of customer-facing Web 2.0 applications by large organizations is simple competitive pressure.  This is something that IT departments have only recently started facing in a serious fashion with outsourcing and other budget diversions in the enterprise as business units decide that they can do better by pitting their internal IT suppliers with external ones.  Thus, because of industry competition, a company's external products tend to improve faster and be more innovative since the concern over the displacement and dislocation of falling behind one's competitive peers is often pronounced in many industries.  Competition is usually much less, and often non-existent, for internal IT products.

it doesn't help us understand if Web 2.0 concepts like crowdsourcing actually work well in the enterprise.  For one thing, instead of recruiting people who have previously had no relationship with you and cost-effectively aggregating their time together to create large levels of new output, employers have a zero-sum game with Web 2.0 inside the firewall.

the best that Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 applications like blogs and wikis can do it increase the productivity of existing business processes by improving efficiency as well as allowing them to self-improve through emergent structure and behavior.

Social network sites are the latest generation of ‘mediated publics’ - environments where people can gather publicly through mediating technology.

Persistence. What you say sticks around.

Searchability.

we expect to be in touch with each other instantly and continuously

people from Sony, from Philips, from Google

people from leading academic institutions in Europe, North America, Japan

The most robust definition (and the most commonly cited) seems to be found in Barbara Gray's Collaborating: Finding Common Ground for Multiparty Problems. She describes collaboration as "a process through which parties who see different aspects of a problem can constructively explore their differences and search for solutions that go beyond their own limited vision of what is possible."[5] In Collaborative Leadership, David Chrislip and Carl Larson offer a slightly different but also useful definition: "It is a mutually beneficial relationship between two or more parties who work toward common goals by sharing responsibility, authority, and accountability for achieving results."[6]

The challenge I have been running into is convincing CTOs, CIOs and CKOs that there are network effects. These people have invested heavily in pre-Web 2.0 "knowledge management" solutions. They view blogs and wikis as a threat to the possible success of their existing investments. They fail to realize that adding a wider range of productivity tools to the Intranet will add value to existing tools, rather than take away from them.Do you have any suggestions on how to communicate this.

A short answer to your question is that in such cases an appeal to corporate competitiveness might make the most sense. Enterprise Web 2.0 (or to use the emerging enterprise 2.0 tag) evangelists such as Andrew McAfee and Dion Hinchcliffe are always on the lookout for corporate success stories to publicize. I'd pay close attention to what they have to say. Often in public presentations they are challenged by corporate audiences to "prove that this stuff works." They always like to point to public examples -- when they can -- in order to rise above the hype. Being able to point out that a comparable or competitive company "is doing X already - why aren't we?" can be a powerful motivator.

As a cost-conscious consultant I would first want to know whether the existing knowledge management system can be augmented with newer collaboration, social networking, and relationship management features in order to extend the investments in infrastructure that have already been made.