A while back I wrote a post about how organizations should use social media monitoring content to feed its internal conversations. Let’s call that “outside-in”, or bringing outside information into the organization.

Now I want to look at “inside-out”. The idea for this post was spawned by the Tim O’Reilly keynote at Web 2.0 Expo NY in September. He said that

Enterprise 2.0 is about exposing the back office.

At first, I didn’t think too much about the statement, just filed it away. Two days later, I was taking my wife’s minivan to the dealer for some maintenance. As I was driving there, I thought, wouldn’t it be cool if I could have access to the entire history of this particular vehicle. Not just maintenance records, but manufacturing records, bill of materials, problem reports, etc., i.e. everything that Honda has stored in their back office that is relevant to this particular vehicle.

(cue bright light bulb over head)

So that is what O’Reilly was talking about. Now it makes sense. E2.0 is not just a social thing, it is about providing the best possible information to the decision maker just-in-time. The social aspect of E2.0 is important because gathering information from the network is a great and highly effective way to become informed; but it is not the end-all and be-all of information gathering.

Lots of spin-off topics come to mind here:

• Customer as Partner
• Online (and vastly better) version of current teleprompt systems for customer service
• Integrating social and structured enterprise data
• Why E2.0 is more than just social stuff
• Motives behind social behavior
• …

…and I plan to address these in upcoming posts.

The central concept here is the more access to information we have AND the better we can filter it to meet our needs, the better off we all will be.