Introducing: Enterprise 2.0
Do you remember Web 2.0? It’s already about 10 years old and labeled a new kind of Web. Previously, only a few enthusiasts and some companies would create web pages for you to read and consume. They would use hyperlinks and giant catalogs to navigate them.
As a first step, Search engines started to aggregate hyperlinks. Forums would allow you to discuss even arcane interest. Step by step everyone would contribute to the Web, posting photos to Flickr, publishing puns on Twitter, commenting on Blog posts, chatting via Skype, streamlining one’s Facebook profile, fix typos in Wikipedia articles and much more.
But eventually we realized we would need to get productive again. Productivity as in: earning money. And that’s where Enterprise 2.0 comes in.
Enterprise 2.0 is not a revamp of a popular spacecraft. It’s applying Web 2.0 concepts to an enterprise environment. An Intranet where everyone can contribute as opposed to some boring outdated guideline pages.
With most of the engineering problems already solved, the main problem is often to tie those solutions together. Information flow and communication are vital for this and therefor get more and more important in today’s offices. However, as people work abroad or companies grow all over the globe, face-to-face-communication gets scarce. Corporations may not work at their full potential if shy techies or people perceived as lower in the hierarchies are not embraced to communicate their ideas. This problem must be fought in many places, but a first step could be to apply Enterprise 2.0 and let people prosper in a company-wide internet.
Take a wiki, install it on your company’s datacenter. Then encourage your employee to migrate their personal notes into that wiki and maybe spend a lazy afternoon organizing things. At Sophisticates, we use a simple dokuwiki to streamline processes and gather ideas. It is much more organized than a collection of word documents on a shared folder somewhere.
Take a blogging engine, install it on you company’s datacenter, and let your employees write about their work and their ideas. If you’re lucky, other employees will comment blog post and a healthy discussion can arise. It may at least form a good platform to replace those mailing list like email conversation, where people reply to only the sender, and meta discussion emails clutter your mission critical mailbox. And your CEO can write about the “big picture” and reach everyone easily. Maybe you can even make most blog posts publicly available.
Take a social network, install it on your company’s datacenter, and open it up to your employees. They may create profile pages with a photo, their room number, contact information and the fields they work on. When new people join your company or different teams, they can quickly gather all the who’s-who information, that was sometimes hard to acquire in larger pre-Enterprise-2.0-shops. We use basecamp at Sophisticates, but I think it is not an ideal solution yet, as it’s excels at project management.
Take a chat service, install it on your company’s datacenter, and help your teams to communicate asynchronously. It’s always better to be in the same office with someone, but you certainly can’t be in an office with everyone, and it’s really helpful to be able to just leave a quick message sometimes. Also, you can determine when to call someone by their online status, so you don’t have to try reaching someone over and over again. At Sophisticates we use Campfire but unfortunately it lacks to one-on-one communication channels and has no VOIP features at all.
Take a search engine, install it on your company’s datacenter, and make all of the above services searchable. You could even take source code manuals, e-books and other sources into account. After all, everything is more usable with a great search feature at hands. You won’t have to remember the place of everything and you can discover new things.
Especially when it comes to search engines, it is clear that a good integration of these components helps a lot. But all the other components are much more useful when adjusted to business processes.
At this point you should be installing wikis, social networks and chat rooms. Maybe you even think about other Web 2.0 technologies and how the would be applicable in a corporate environment; I would love to hear about your ideas. Maybe you’ll stumble over solutions like SharePoint.
However, with so many people working on the basis of opensource solutions trying to integrate them with each other, I think it’s time to create a distribution of these existing opensource solutions. It may start of with a catalog of useful wikis, blogs engines, chat systems.
In a second step, it would be neat to provide a set of shell scripts to install those easily. Maybe bundle a bunch of webserver configurations files too, for easy setup.
In the end, a package manager can be used to add components and special plugins may be provided to make those projects more suited to business applications.
Email me when Bernhard Häussner publishes or recommends stories