The Work Place and Enterprise 2.0

In a few of the previous posts, the topic of businesses not adapting to Enterprise 2.0 has been a constant topic. It seems that businesses are more afraid of people using these tools wrong at work than seeing the benefits that these applications can bring. In Dion Henchcliffe’s blog, he discusses how some companies may start seeing the benefits. In an informal poll he has taken recently, employees now have differing access to these tools. As of late, employees have more access to blogs and wikis. Another trend he saw was that most young employees, probably because they are in college or at their first entry level job, have the least amount of access to these tools.

While blogs and wikis continue to show the potential to greatly improve collaboration, create higher levels of knowledge retention, and generate more reusable business information over time, it’s also probable that in attempts to access the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 platforms, these new platforms will incur some issues that IT departments and the business will have to deal with, particularly if these platforms are exposed outside the organization.

There are many downfalls to allowing employees access to systems like this such as public access to company information, some of the tools are not enterprise ready and the use of the tools for non-business purposes creates inefficiencies. However, there are benefits which Henchcliffe points out:
o Social media tends to capture more institutional knowledge that’s reusable.
o Tagging and other emergent organization methods allow business information to be organized
and cross-referenced from every point of view.
o Increased efficiency in conversations: social media scales up to mostly resource and time
friendly conversations among thousands of asynchronous participants, yet excludes those
uninterested in them, unlike e-mail distribution lists and conference calls.

Is your company willing to work out the kinks of a new system to reap the benefits?