Enterprise two point twitter?
by Tom Mandel
My friend Luis Suarez, an IBM knowledge management 2.0 guru, has written a nice post about the ways Twitter would be useful to enterprise workers, especially those who are very mobile — obviously, that’s a growing number.
It’s a great post, and I hope you’ll click over for a read — so I won’t summarize it here. What I will say is that it indicates a trend I’m watching: an amazing percentage of new services on the Web, that debut for… well, lets say just for whoever might be interested in something new (usually - tho not always - techies and geeks), really do refactor well for enterprise use. Sometimes, as in the case of Twitter, it’s obvious — especially once someone like Luis does the work of pointing the applications out to you! Other times, it is a matter of experimenting with the functionality of an online service and trying to think through how it would translate to your business context.
On the subject of software to experiment with, I’ve been looking at Library Thing, a service that lets you catalog your books, tag them, and create social networks around the books in your library. It’s neat.
It seems obvious to me that Library Thing would be useful in an enterprise context. We all have favorite books, ones that have influenced us or that we have been able to apply in our business life. Nor need it be limited to books — periodicals, individual articles, Wikipedia entries, blogs and posts, each of these represents a social nexus, a way to find, interact with, and grow through people who can add to what we know and can do. In that sense, Library Thing, which was certainly not conceived for business use, seems a natural for business users to experiment with.
One thing we may be learning is that “collaboration” is not the only, maybe not even the main, software-supported social application. I.e., neither wikis nor blogs even begin to exhaust the field of enterprise social software. We may be about to figure out that they really aren’t even central to the field. Perhaps it’s the kind of connections that have potential for serendipity that are the greatest untapped resource within the social potential of the enterprise.
Software and serendipity — now there’s a subject for further investigation. Please feel free to use the comment thread to that end. I’ll be very interested to follow and participate in the discussion.
