I’m at Web 2.0 and Beyond – Applying Social and Collaborative Tools To Business .
Social Tools Hit The Mainstream
Lee Bryant, Headshift
Ideas behind social tools now ready to challenge lots of existing IT and Internal Communications practices inside organisations – Tim O’Reilly
The social stack:
- Personal tools – organise your “stuff” by tags- personal portals, manage networks and feeds.
- Group Collaboration – wikis and group systems
- Blogs and networks
- Bookmarks and Tags
- Public feeds and flows
Proven benefits:
- Simpler, smarter, cheaper enterprise computing.
- Better personal productivity – move stuff email that doesn’t need to be in it, social network as information filter, better findability.
- Network productivity and presence sharing – “flow”formal
- Better informal collaboration and sharing
- Collaboration and networking – including with other businesses you are partnering with
- Open innovation
- Internal communications – more interactive engagement, combination of tools and media two-way not just broadcast.
- Recruiting and retaining emergent talent – the “digital native” expect to participate. Many of their IT skills being wasted by forcing them into traditional IT environment.
- In-context, continual informal learning
Success factors:
- Start with small, simple self-powered projects.
- Create conditions for shared meaning e.g. a shared del.icio.us account – share social objects
Challenges
- Enterprise IT sucks badly – IT industry still centralising, internet is about intelligence at the edges.
- Try to put IT in the hands of the users – IT governance processes can slow things down so much that costs can be an order of magnitude higher.
- Moving from .doc and email to the wiki way
- Iterative approach, agile development. Get something done, expose it to users, adapt to feedback.
- Enterprise Information Architecture – moving away from a priori taxonomies to folksonomies. Individual tagging actions lead to collective benefit.
- Information Professional become network nodes.
- Support the early adopters, but avoid it being a geek ghetto. Make more intimate collaboration environments. Everything needs to be based on a real-world use case. Think of the web as an innovation lab.
Three Myths
- Social Networking is a waste of time – recognise that online life is distributed, don’t cut it off when they come through the door.
- New security risks? – yes, but the old ones are worse, because people work around bad old unusable IT
- Sharing is dangerous? We cannot stem the tide of sharing – better to teach responsibility than police use
