Enterprise 2.0 Going Mainstream

October 10, 2008 – 10:43 am

There is nothing like a good old-fashioned economic downturn to get companies to start thinking beyond the status quo and start looking for new and better ways to  work.

I found this article as the top link on Google Finance this morning. It is a USAToday/Gannett article about how social media can be used by organizations to help employees work better together. WOW! What a concept, I didn’t see that one coming.    :-O

Some excerpts:

Social networking is going corporate.

The popular technology used by millions of people to share ideas and photos on MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and others is catching on at companies to improve productivity and communication among workers.

The article goes on to quote, Dan Nye of LinkedIn, Gina Bianchini of Ning, and Ross Mayfield of SocialText, among others. The primary benefits that companies can accrue from these tools, according to the article, are reduction in travel expense, which I believe is a real bottom line saving, and email reduction, which I think the jury is still out on.

But, of course, there is so much more. Over time, I think the real value organizations are going to see by making the shift to collaborative and collective systems, will be in the areas of increased employee engagement, improved employee retention, and ultimately elevated levels of customer satisfaction.

And as it just so happens, I am working on a new webinar series with Near-Time to will address these exact issues, so stayed tuned for details.

By Lee White | Posted in General | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Inside-Out: Opening the Enterprise

October 9, 2008 – 10:55 am

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.

By Lee White | Posted in Concepts | Tagged , | Comments (0)

Coworking in NC

September 25, 2008 – 10:37 am

There is a new Coworking space in town (well it is in Carrboro actually). But it is the first the first incorporated coworking space in North Carolina, “Carrboro Creative Coworking”. So if you are ever in the Chapel Hill area and need some working space, check it out. I plan to.

Congratulations Brian on getting this up and running.

By Lee White | Posted in General | Tagged , , | Comments (1)

links for 2008-09-20

September 20, 2008 – 11:30 am

By Lee White | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Web 2.0 Expo Notes

September 18, 2008 – 11:19 am

I am entering the third day of my great adventure to NYC at Web 2.0 Expo. Here are a few notes to capture some of the thoughts and events I have experienced.

DAY 1

Actually that would be night 1, since I didn’t arrive until 6:30 and it took an hout to get to my hotel via SuperShuttle. The one and only order of business was to make it to the TechSet party. I was able to find some friends there and have some great conversatons. Really enjoyed talking to Thomas Vanderwal and Daniela Barbosa.

DAY 2

I spent the majority of my time hanging around the Web2Open, the unconference associated with the conference. I led a conversation about Enterprise 2.0 (what else). I also ran into an old friend from business school Neal Goldman, who is here with Eluma, that has a product that he describes as del.icio.us on steriods. I plan on checking it out (unfortunately still no Mac OSX client). And for my most interesting adventure of the day: attending  Yankees game! As I was leaving the expo, I ran into Andrew Hyde and he had an extra ticket for the game, so I figured WTF. My first  (and last) trip to Yankee Stadium.  Interesting fact, the entire group that went together was only conected by Twitter.

Day 3

Still early in the day, but I did attend the keynote this morning, where Tim O’Reilly and Clay Shirky spoke. Tim’s main point was, if you are going to do something, do something that matters! A realy good presentation. I hope to give a better summary later. Clay talked about the fact the information overload has really been around for a long time, the problem we are really seeing now is “filter failure”. It made me think.

That’s it for now…

By Lee White | Posted in General | Tagged , , | Comments (1)
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