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RSS feedsWikipedia is home to many weird and wonderful definitions, but some of its editors took deep exception to the inclusion of “ Enterprise 2.0 ”.
As a self-confessed Wikipedia virgin, Mike Stopforth had put up his original definition thinking that the idea was to get a draft up so it could be refined by the community. But, he told IWR, “I was not helped, assisted or counselled. Just squashed by some Wikipedian.
The Wikipedia committee rejected the term on the grounds that it was “a neologism of dubious utility”.
Neologism? The term had already been taken up by a large community of professionals working in this space, and in more than 25,000 blog posts. Enterprise 2.0 has legs, as they say, even though they are slightly shaky.
“Web 2.0” appeared in Wikipedia just four months after it was first publicised. It’s now six months since Enterprise 2.0 appeared. And even the smartest people in the industry wouldn’t dare make a judgement call on its “utility”, dubious or otherwise, at the moment.
If the term proves useful, its definition can be refined. The fundamental idea is sound: how technology can help knowledge workers do human things like collaborate and co-operate.
Stopforth says: “It’s 10% about technology and 90% about people.” And this is what the IT propeller-heads just don’t get. Even company management doesn’t really want to get it because it threatens power structures.
But, for IWR readers, Enterprise 2.0 offers fabulous possibilities. Crudely stated, our readers’ job is the effective collection and delivery of the right information to the right people at the right time. That information can come from external or internal resources, including users’ own heads. A lot of it is unstructured and doesn’t lend itself well to conventional IT systems.
But it does map rather nicely onto a lot of the new tools. You can also and this is the important bit theoretically implement them yourself. You don’t need IT involvement to deploy people-centric initiatives. You just find the tools that most closely match your needs and get on with it.
Enterprise 2.0 embraces the social computing mix - wikis, blogs, RSS feeds, tags, search, recommendations - all of which slash email usage and get people communicating effectively around their interests. You can build portals using a service like NetVibes and use an RSS tool to scrape sites or filter info feeds according to your interests.
We’re also talking about connectors being put at the edge of information resources, so that you can reach inside (through an API) and get what you need out. Even better, use some of the “mashups” (sorry about the term) created by the likes of Talis.
Software as a service (SaaS) is an increasingly popular way to a) get software, and b) sidestep IT. It’s not in our area, but Salesforce.com is a global success story with more than 500,000 subscribers. It has a developer community around it which is extending the functionality daily. Users pay a monthly per-seat fee and all backups, maintenance, product upgrades and so on are taken care of.
IT and the organisation will eventually wake up to the need for effective integration, but, in the short term, you have a chance to be in the driving seat.
Control 2.0 anyone?
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