Accenture gets into Intranet 2.0

Via IT Business, an insight into Accenture’s efforts to introduce web 2.0 concepts into their corporate intranet:

[…] borrowing ideas from online services such as Facebook, De.licio.us, YouTube, Wikipedia and Second Life to remake Accenture’s employee intranet.

Just this month, Accenture went live with a new global employee network that looks much like Facebook, the popular web site on which mostly young people share pictures and information about their interests.

Accenture also has visual, context-assisted search capabilities already up and running. […] picked up on the idea of allowing every user to tag content as the De.licio.us web site does, thus creating a co-operative way of classifying material that benefits all users.

[…] And there will be wikis – co-operatively edited Web pages – to allow anyone in the company to publish material for internal use. “If you make it easy for your employees to publish information, they’ll publish information,”

[…] “The younger employees carry it,” he says – they will be the first to publish on wikis, to tag content and so on. Others will follow as they see the value, though Rippert adds that some of the new capabilities, such as improved search functions, will replace the old way of doing things and employees will have little choice about using them.

I wonder what other elements will be introduced next. Social bookmarking would seem to be a logical next step, or perhaps internal blogs?

Coopetition in “as a service”: Enterprise Content Management …

Mike Gotta thinks that Salesforce’s Koral move (Apex Content) puts them in competition with Cisco that recently acquired WebEx:

At some point, Salesforce needed to respond to the productivity, content and collaboration platform Cisco can exploit given WebEx WebOffice and WebEx Connect.

I would add that Salesforce clearly moves to take a stance against other collaboration and content management players like e.g. Microsofts Sharepoint or Google (as Nick Carr notes), while it validates the increasing importance of “as a service”-offerings. Hence, its position in the SaaS-landscape is a hybrid one: While offerings like Google Apps are competitors in some ways, they are good competitors because they strengthen the SaaS-model as a whole, heck – they might even collaborate in expanding this market, and they will stay friends quite some time.

Digital business podcast

Looks interesting, this new podcast by Financial Times digital business team (here the mp3), all about collaboration and web 2.0 in the enterprise:

Polycom CEO Bob Hagerty weighs the merits of videoconferencing versus ‘physical relationships’; Nicholas Carr introduces Internet 2.0; columnist and author Ade McCormack begins a new regular feature demystifying complex IT topics; and Alan Cane asks Andy Mulholland of Capgemini what corporate mash-ups are all about.

Interview with Ross Mayfield

Paul Dunay interviewed Ross Mayfield on wikis and published it as a podcast. You can’t download the audio file, but you can listen to it via a flash player.

I like this way of presentation, as it shows the cut marks of the recording and allows to skip forward and backward in the TOC:

Start podcast 00:00:00
Enterprise 2.0 defined 00:00:28
First Enterprise 2.0 deployment 00:02:07
How to Implement a Wiki 00:02:46
SAP’s Wiki implementaion 00:04:55
External marketing Wiki example 00:06:06
The Best Way to rollout a Wiki 00:08:13
How to build Adoption of your Wiki 00:11:55
What is the typical first project to start a Wiki? 00:14:59
How to get more info on Wikis 00:15:48

This interview touches also a lot of stuff that I layed out in my presentation here. No wonder I recommend both to anyone interested in social software for the enterprise …

BEA en.terpri.se

In my presentation I shortly introduced BEAs en.terpri.se initiative, i.e. launching three Web 2.0 style applications for their enterprise customers:

  • Ensemble (for mashups)
  • Pages (drag-and-drop collaborative workspaces)
  • Pathways (an information discovery tool)

Well, more (product) information at en.terpri.se of course, Dana Gardner has info on the background of these offerings here, Chris Bucchere has more insight into the value proposition, the concepts behind this move and its overall position in the uptaking of the enterprise 2.0 theme. I would argue that this strengthens and validates the overall trend that incumbent enterprise software shops are incorporating web 2.0 features into their products (and business models).

And this move also reflects the findings of several enterprise 2.0 studies (like those by Forrester and McKinsey) on which I plan to blog about over the coming easter holidays … let’s see how this pulls all together.

Emergent wiki uses in organization

Chris Fletcher on pragmatic wiki adoption, adding to Bill Ives take (“Creating Successful Niche Content Spaces on the Web“):

[wikis] work best when there is a specific business need – getting teams to collaborate around a specific business issue or building community around a service offering is a great way to get individuals to start to experiment with how the wiki can be used

Straight to the point. He also argues against big bang approaches of wiki deployment, something that I can understand very well, and argue for all the time. In fact one big advantage of wikis is their capacity for emergence, i.e. letting patterns of usage evolve over time, which is not really leveraged when we install wikis in a pre-defined top-down way. Interestingly, betting on emergence does not collide with the demand for “specific business needs”, when these

  • only define a starting point for wiki usage
  • don’t restrict extensions and cross-theme wiki-linking
  • are (constantly) evaluated and adapted

Vortrag AK Wissensmanagement

Mein Vortrag für das Meeting des Arbeitskreises Wissensmanagement:

Heute abend, 18:30, bei der MFG Medien- und Filmgesellschaft Baden-Württemberg mbH im Bosch Areal, Stuttgart.