by James Robertson
February 9, 2007 at 10:54 am
· Filed under Enterprise 2.0
Whenever enterprise 2.0 is mentioned, it’s all about rolling out blogs and wikis. Whether using free or commercial software, these two pieces of software have come to define what “enterprise 2.0″ is all about.
My question would be though: are blogs and wikis really it, or are they simply the first pieces of software to become famous?
Let’s face it, blogs and wikis are not exactly revolutionary, at least, not within the enterprise. At their heart, they are both lightweight publishing tools. Blogs provide an “online diary”, while wikis offer a simple documentation/collaboration space.
Yes, I know they enable different forms of interaction and communication, and this is where the real value is gained. Nonetheless, blogs and wikis in their current incarnations are pretty clunky. They don’t even work together all that well…
And just because they have both been tremendously successful out on the web, this doesn’t mean they automatically gain the same success (or play the same role) within the enterprise.
If enterprise 2.0 really does succeed, the one thing that I know for sure is that the evolution of software solutions won’t stop with the current generation of blogs and wikis.
Whatever we end up using is going to be far more flexible, powerful and elegant. Still simple, but a lot more evolved from the clumsy tools we are currently using.
So perhaps we should stop getting caught up in the cult of ”blogs and wikis”, and start thinking about what else might make up enterprise 2.0…
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And let’s not limit it to software. It’s all about the impact on and implications for the workplace.
I wouldn’t even say that wikis have been “tremendously successful” on the web, though blogs surely have been. Indeed, wikis – one of the oldest web technologies – have had the slowest adoption curve of any web-based tool, I believe.
I would think that the technologies central to Enterprise 2.0 must be those with an ‘enterprise’ impact. Not an impact only on the work of a single person, or a group of people, but on the affordances of *all* enterprise work, and indeed of the enterprise IT stack as a whole.
Neither wikis nor blogs fit this description.
At this point, there is no valid reason why a vendor would make an ‘enterprise’ choice of a wiki platform. There is no benefit to the enterprise via content management or handshake w/ the current IT stack to drive such a decision. Any set of users in the enterprise can use pretty much any tool, it seems to me. If I’m missing something, I would love to know what it is.
One could make a better argument for adopting an enterprise-wide blogging platform, as blogs fit together like lego pieces, and underlying engines for tagging and so forth are nice at the platform level.
Nonetheless, neither blogs nor wikis can carry any load for any content outside their realms; they are not really the platform for Enterprise 2.0.
What is? Tagging, social bookmarking and social networking, that’s what. Now, full disclosure; I’m involved in a startup offering just this platform: http://www.connectbeam.com. So take my words with whatever quantity of salt seems appropriate to you. Yet, think about it — don’t these functions better provide a platform from which wikis and blogs might emerge than the reverse?
I believe we will see wide adoption of these paradigms (and the services of Connectbeam, I hope) within the next 24 months.
(This is so long I’m going to cross-post it at http://www.tommandel.com/blog/)
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MeghanFebruary 9th, 2007 at 1:12 pm |
I think you might be interested in IDC’s recent executive brief, “Getting Results by Empowering the Information Worker: What Web 2.0 Offers Beyond Blogs and Wikis.”
You can download it here: http://www.myworklight.com/contactUs.aspx?catid=62&Category_Parent=28
I’ve spent the past ten years immersed in trying to understand how knowledge is recorded and share, on both sides of the firewall. I’ve been involved with millions of dollars worth of KM development projects — and had some very expensive lessons from failures. Blogs and wikis (and especially blogs) are “it” because of their bottom-up, push-button publishing approach. While wiki software (at least mediawiki) is not yet at the push-button point yet, it still invites bottom-up experimentation — both outside and inside the enterprise. Bundled together with tagging, simple “social” tools like what is taking place with MyBlogLog.com and the integration of bookmark and link and note-sharing in other forms, and the “it” you are referring to will appear. Blogs and wikis may not be “it,” but they will be a significant part of the DNA in whatever “it” becomes.
Ray Lane described it succintly: The Inter-Personal Enterprise. Additionally, it’s about all things “simple” and “relevant”. It’s understanding the needs of the employees. People Lookup is a simple box that returns a profile on an employee or a collection of them if you enter an attribute or term that matches their profile. It’s about finding the highest used activities (including various corporate applications) and ‘chunking’ them in the same way that chunks of a document might be relevant to a search…raising the highest-valued activity to a ’snippet’ on a desktop collection, drilling through to more interface, if needed.
Simple, relevant…design
In addition to tagging and social networking, mashups or composite applications may become the most used and useful applicaion in Enterprise 2.0 as they allow for quicxk to build combinations of data.
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