Category: web 2.0

Melanie Turek provides some good tips on blogging: Blogging in the Enterprise: Tips for Success. There are still many organizations that are not taking advantage of blogs behind the firewall.

In the increasingly virtual workplace, it’s important for employees to make virtual connections—and blogs are one way to help them do that.

In the enterprise, there are two ways to use blogs. One is a corporate-supported (and approved) blog that’s meant to be read by the outside world; the other is an internal blog for employees’ eyes only, for sharing information and creating job and interest-related connections. (There are also lots of blogs out there penned by individuals who use the space to discuss their companies and the markets they are in, among other interests, but these are not technically “enterprise blogs,” as they are not established or supported by the companies themselves.)

Frankly, I don’t see a lot of either type of enterprise blog being used today, and I rarely talk to people who have even considered an internal version. But I think that’s actually the type that has the most promise for the enterprise.

Internal blogs can provide tremendous benefits if developed and supported by the culture change that is necessary: 

Internally-focused blogs are easier to maintain and serve a more relevant purpose. Companies with large numbers of remote or virtual employees can use enterprise blogs to keep those staffers connected to the company and one another. By setting up a variety of blogs tagged to specific topics, companies allow employees to share ideas for new products, IT fixes and best practices, better business processes, strong customer service.

Are you taking advantage of blogging in your organization?

The wiki world is running at a fever pitch right now. Socialtext has released Socialtext 2.0, Jotspot has been acquired by Google, Atlassian is approaching 2,000 enterprise customers and Microsoft will enter the space with Windows Sharepoint Services V3.

The enterprise market is hot. From the InternetNews article:

Rather than being driven by senior management, however, adoption is coming mainly from project managers and department-level executives.

Wikis can help companies stimulate innovation:

One reason is that wikis hold the promise of helping companies stimulate more innovation by their employees.

That’s important: 80 percent of CEOs see collaboration as being critical to growth, according to a survey conducted by IBM last March.

Jeff Nolan, the former head of venture capital at enterprise software vendor SAP, agreed that enterprises are struggling to find ways to stimulate innovation.

“Large enterprises are at the barrier of how they can create new ideas,” he told internetnews.com.

On supporting typical organizational activities:

Charles Hill, Lotus lead designer for social computing at IBM, said wikis are an ideal tool for supporting a group that’s trying to get on the same page about a project.

People involved in the project can add pages to the wiki or edit existing pages.

Some enterprise wiki solutions also allow users to attach documents, generate blogs, RSS feeds and even transform wiki pages into e-mails.

 On controlling and segregating wiki content:

But companies should avoid the temptation to be overly controlling, noted Jotspot CEO Joe Kraus.

“You want to be restrictive when it comes to keeping information inside the four walls of the company. Within the company, you want to be more liberal than not,” he told internetnews.com.

Wikis also help address another problem companies have struggled with for years, which is how to collect and retain knowledge that is in people’s heads or in unstructured documents like e-mail.

Previous so-called knowledge-management solutions have foundered because people are loathe to spend time thanklessly regurgitating their experiences into some knowledge repository for the good of the company.

Wikis, on the other hand, are a more natural way for people to explain their thought processes and get kudos along the way.

“Wikis provide a social incentive to share knowledge,” Socialtext CEO Ross Mayfield told internetnews.com. “People don’t like filling in forms, but they enjoy telling stories about their day.”