Enterprise 2.0 social networking capabilities can help organizations capture unstructured tacit knowledge to improve knowledge management and collaboration across the enterprise. Andrew McAfee, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School, defines Enterprise 2.0 as the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.
- Social software enables people to rendezvous, connect or collaborate through computer-mediated communication and to form online communities.
- Platforms are digital environments in which contributions and interactions are globally visible and persistent over time.
- Emergent means that the software is freeform, and that it contains mechanisms to let the patterns and structure inherent in people’s interactions become visible over time.
- Freeform means that the software is most or all of the following;
- Optional
- Free of up-front workflow
- Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
- Accepting of many types of data
Social software for an enterprise must according to McAfee have the following functionality to work well:
- Search: allow users to search for other users or content
- Links: group similar users or content together
- Authoring: include blogs and wikis
- Tags: allow users to tag content
- Extensions: recommendations of users or content based on profile
- Signals: allow people to subscribe to users or content with RSS feeds
He recommends that the software must be easy to use and not impose any rigid structure for users. The roll-out should be informal, but on a common platform to enable future collaboration between areas. He also recommends strong and visible managerial support to achieve this.
Is this the next big thing for organizations? Please let me know your view on this.
By Atle Skjekkeland.
Atle - the need to collaborate beyond our immediate surroundings within organizations has always existed, and we now have the tools to achieve this. What is missing is the willingness (primarily) and skills to change the way we work to learn how to develop relationships that aren't "face to face". I think that many social networking sites are changing that in the younger generations.
However, I think that you raise the right points about the software being easy to use with an informal roll-out (allow users to take up responsibility). There is an obvious need for small groups to collaborate on projects, strategy, or general collaboration, but we have a long way to go to achieve the kind of open, enterprise-wide collaboration that many people are advocating.
Great post - keep up the great blog.
Posted by: Scott Annan | October 11, 2007 at 08:49 AM