Enterprise 2.0

Last week I covered the third category in my approach to planning Enterprise 2.0. The fourth and final category is connection.

Day Four: Connection

With social software, interaction is distributed over time, between multiple individuals and even across different systems. The tools that make connections between and within people and content are therefore critical in bringing together the other three Cs - namely communication, cooperation and collaboration.

In Enterprise 2.0, I introduce five social computing technologies that can provide these connections.

Social networking

Social networking between friends needs no introduction. In the enterprise it can be valuable when the organization rewards individual effort but perhaps needs to encourage more knowledge sharing across geographical or functional boundaries. Internal applications of social networking that mix both personal and professional interests are more likely to succeed.

Tagging

Tagging and syndication (see below) are possibly the only two technologies that are used on a widespread basis throughout all social software, to make information easier to search, discover and navigate. Tagging is the cornerstone of creating user-generated taxonomies (or folksonomies) that help people connect with information using social software and aggregate information from disparate sources into one subject-related place.

The debates rumbles on over whether folksonomies are better than formal classification systems, but Forrester Research have outlined some of the reasons the latter no longer works:

• Content creators lack time and incentives;
• Professional taxonomists are hard to justify;
• Metadata authoring tools are awkward;
• Software automation has not reached its full potential.

I recommend a hybrid approach, a combination of taxonomy and folksonomy. A ‘talksonomy’ perhaps?

Search (and social search)

Study after study shows that when it comes to searching enterprise content, employees’ expectations are not being met. The algorithmic approaches they use rely too much on the author of a piece of information to determine the search terms under which it should be found. Enterprises also have smaller corpuses of content to be searched so it is harder to aggregate the data needed to determine relevance. Nor do intranet authors have the incentives of their Internet counterparts to index their content or use links as an ad hoc voting mechanism.

Social search takes a different approach to the problem, relying on human beings to select the content that is important and index it using keywords that mean something to them. By tapping into the collective intelligence of a large group of people, social search engines build a universe of content that has gone through a process of selection, but has also been tagged.

Syndication

Syndication is the only realistic way left to filter all the information and interaction ‘noise’ that social software generates. RSS is the format that has risen to the top of the pile and is now commonplace in all forms of social software.

In the enterprise RSS has many uses, including:

• Internal communication;
• Information aggregation and syndication;
• Enterprise 2.0 collaboration.

Mashups

Increasingly, companies will want to combine many of the outputs from social software systems with existing enterprise applications and even external services. Application programming interfaces (APIs) make this a relatively quick and painless process. The result is something called a mashup - a website or application that combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

Summary

That concludes my introduction to the 4Cs approach to enterprise social software planning. I hope you found it useful. There is, of course, much more detail in the book - and no doubt I’ll revisit some of the themes again in future posts.

I’d love to know if you find this approach useful - or otherwise.