A few words on Enterprise 2.0 – Part 1

Here is one of the buzzwords in this « 2.0 » trend nobody can escape from… « Entreprise 2.0 », or how to use at work, some of those trendy features we use as personal tools…

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Enterprise 2.0 is the use of 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.

Some features of such platforms:

• Document library: for storing, sharing and accessing the documents that work activities depends on. When doing knowledge work, one is producing quite a bit of information, and the amount of data that ends up trapped in email is astounding. This leads to a couple of problems. [More in Part 2]
• Publishing of employee profiles and searches against those profiles encourage unplanned collaboration and informal interactions as effective ways to solve business problems: expertise location increases productivity and organizational success by identifying the status and location of human expertise in the organization.
• Corporate blogs are used as knowledge-management forums. They give people an intuitive environment in which to share information and collaborate. Participants can continue the conversation, challenge each other and push ideas forward in a collaborative network.
• Corporate wikis provide an easy-to-use environment for subject-matter experts to publish their interpretation on any subject.
• Tag-based classifications: Tagging, which is one of the defining characteristics of Web 2.0 services, allows users to collectively classify and find information. [More in Part 3]
• Rating gives community participants the ability to assign qualitative and popularity values to content, such as a simple up-or-down ranking system or the most often read help files. As content is generated, a rating system provides a way for users to sift through it. It involves the idea that « the wisdom of the crowd » can help sort out the best material.

In summary:
Enterprise 2.0 tools make it easier to share and organize information / documents. Tagging and rating provide a straightforward way to find content and make judgments about what to look at. Blogs and wikis are natural collaboration and communication platforms. Social network tools / profiles publication help staff find the right individual or group of people. Enterprise 2.0 has the potential to provide knowledge and content management in a surprisingly cheap and easy fashion using Web-based tools.

Part 2 will dig more into Document Library, and Part 3 will describe something called Folksonomy…