Since our beta launch I have come in contact with several new folks with deep experience in the enterprise, who have been kind enough to share with me their perspective on Web 2.0 for the enterprise.
When we founded Connectbeam, we placed our bets on certain concepts and trends, and how we saw them changing the enterprise landscape over the next few years.
Where we have had the opportunity, on some of our public speaking occasions, we have talked about our company vision by saying that - the way, something as simple as social bookmarking will manifest itself inside the enterprise is going to ripple through just about all business units and enterprise processes and workflows.
One such manifestation of social bookmarking is in the area of expertise and knowledge management, which can already be found implemented inside Connectbeam today.
I recently stumbled upon the writings of Ken Yarmosh, a web strategy consultant and owner of Technosight and was pleasantly surprised to see, that he had been thinking and covering similar ground since quite some time. He makes a detailed and compelling case of how and why Web 2.0 matters to the enterprise.
An excerpt follows:
Having some sort of back-up is particularly important for a small business or a team based larger organization. Subject matter experts while crucial to the success of a project can be equally detrimental if they leave and no one else knows what they knew.
Knowledge building is a step beyond this potential problem. It assumes that the good practice of knowledge collection occurs on a regular basis. It’s importance comes in the fact that with this knowledge (often referred to as “data”) at our fingertips, decisions can be made more easily.
Outside of the enterprise, new ideas of knowledge building are springing-up. They are often referred to as “mash-ups”. The ideas behind a mash-up is to take the data of one source and combine it with a web application to make it richer and more valuable. One often referred to mash-up example is Housing Maps - it combines data from craigslist and Google Maps.
These types of applications could be tremendously useful inside the corporate firewall. Imagine, if the data from the social bookmarking tool I referred to in earlier post could be synthesized and then put on the intranet portal homepage. There are many implementations of this idea that could become the business manager’s “dashboard” of the future.
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