Enterprise 2.0 is the latest buzzphrase. It lifted off in April with the publication of the MITSloan Management Review (payment needed) by Andrew P McAfee. It's Web 2.0 behind the firewall. To define the essential components, McAfee coined the acronym SLATES: Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions and Signals.
For a start SLATES is inclusive. It enables employees to create a body of knowledge, a sliver at a time, for fellow employees. It can be tacked on to existing systems, it's not a replacement for them. It's searchable Google-fashion: everything is completely indexed and links help raise the importance of the pointed-to information.
Anyone who alights on a page they like can tag it with one-word reminders of why it's useful. Tagging helps anyone find pages by commonly-used key-words, whether they appear in the body or not.
Extensions, in this context, are "if you like this then, by extension, you'll like that", the sort of things that Amazon and StumbleUpon do. And Signalling is the use of RSS to tip you off when something new of interest to you appears.
McAfee's SLATES acronym provides a handy checklist for anyone thinking of exploring this space.
Ask yourself, how restricting is your intranet? Can you only find stuff according to
someone's idea of what should be in the index? I won't even ask if it's
easily navigated. What about the content? Is it centrally-determined
and management led? How about being tipped off if anything of interest
changes? Maybe you have good answers to all those questions. My guess
is you probably haven't.
Time for a change?
Which vendors are now touting this?
ReplyDeleteSince it's the articulation of a philosophy (call it "Web 2.0 behind the firewall" if you like) then there are no companies "touting it" as a product. But there are plenty touting it as an approach to social computing.
ReplyDeleteI'd Google something like: "Web 2.0" "social computing" intranet blog wiki rss enterprise and read the top ten results.
Number one happens to be Ross Mayfield's Weblog where he talks about Andrew McAfee. (No surprises there then.)
And Ross Mayfield's Socialtext enterprise wiki/blog combo plays in exactly that space.
So there's someone who is touting the philosophy with real product and quite a bunch of real users, although it would be nice to hear about someone other than Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein for a change.