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the Free CMSWire NewsletterFlashback one year, and organizations were struggling to define Enterprise 2.0 — much less determine whether it could even provide value.
But today, more pilots are being deployed, more results are being measured and more companies are identifying what’s working and what isn’t. Knowledge practitioners and information professionals now loosely agree on what E2.0 is, and they are starting to discover concrete benefits to the bottom line.
To date, there is no definitive right or wrong way to implement E2.0. This can be both a help and a hindrance. On the plus side, E2.0's flexibility gives organizations the ability to adapt it to their business objectives, using a combination of technologies, processes, and resources needed to gain positive results.
However, E2.0’s subjective definition and lack of guidelines and requirements can make it difficult to understand, introduce and integrate it into a company. Organizations define and measure their success against their own business objectives, and that’s not something easily replicated across companies.
Any way you slice it, E2.0 is going to be different for everyone. And that’s OK. However, there is a common thread emerging as a best practice: getting internal and external collaboration functioning under the same umbrella.
Building a Collaborative Environment
Many organizations still have internal collaboration with staff and external communication with customers as mutually exclusive operations. However, with the advent of social technologies, many are finding real benefit to having both internal and external groups operating under the same social umbrella.
Just as you want your sales and marketing teams synced up and supporting each other’s efforts, you also want your E2.0 efforts to support internal collaboration and innovation, as well as external customer/brand objectives.
While both internal and external collaboration aim to socialize people and information, they come at it from different vantage points. E2.0 has largely been fueled by consumer social networking habits. The consumer-based social phenomenon has effectively carried over to the enterprise, mainly in the form of external collaboration, which has usually taken the form of activities such as blogging, tweeting, Facebooking, Flickring, YouTubing, etc. with customers and communities outside the firewall.
Recently, managers and executives alike are realizing that social networking extends well beyond a customer community or brand development, and that there are benefits to uniting collaboration efforts so that they include staff and internal experts.
Looking at a range of socially enabled tools will help build collaborative environments. Blogs are good for certain types of collaboration, discussion forums for others, corporate wikis for yet others. Each has its place, but each should contribute to the organization’s collective goals.
For example, one of today's dominant needs is to move discussions out of e-mail and into a technology that distributes and preserves knowledge across the organization. This can benefit and fuel ideas for both brand development and product enhancement.
Relationships are the Bricks, Content is the Mortar
A foundation that spans both internal and external collaboration is relationships. Relationships in E2.0 are not limited to people, but include interactions between employees, teams, experts, content, knowledge assets and the community at large — including customers, partners and prospects.
An effective E2.0 approach sits at the intersection of enterprise search, content management and social software. And perhaps it is managing the relationships between staff, knowledge assets and the community that will prove most valuable, because, as a whole, it has largely been an untapped collaboration advantage.
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