Enterprise 2.0 - the big and broad picture

This interview with Don Tapscott, well-known guru and seer in the world of technology and business, is interesting for the way it paints the Enterprise 2.0 future as being a major revolution. Don also covers a range of topics, from the importance of the expectations and behaviour of the younger 'net generation' as they enter the workforce - a point referred to in my previous posts - to changing business models. He thinks it's going to be big - massive - which may be true as he's a bit imprecise about timescales. Worth a read.

Which companies are blogging and wiki-ing?

I'm getting the impression that plenty of large companies pretty much haven't heard of the Enterprise 2.0 concept, and I've been surprised how "off the pace" some information management professionals are on the subject. Good news, perhaps, for those like myself who see these companies as their market.

But if all organisations were at that stage then it would be even more of an uphill battle than it is to turn these ideas into reality. Fortunately there are some early adopters who, as far as I can tell, have had some success with their projects. I'm going to sprinkle a few names around that I've picked up over recent weeks. I don't have first hand knowledge of the success of these projects, but I've no reason to believe that they have been over-egged any more than any project is. Here we go.

The BBC has adopted wikis and blogs at the instigation of Euan Semple. At a function I attended recently Euan mentioned one example that sticks in my mind: joint authoring of a policy document by about 90 authors, in a fraction of the time that similar documents have taken to produce the traditional, sequential way.

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) achieved extensive use of a wiki in their (large) IT department, thanks to the efforts of then CIO (now Confused of Calcutta) JP Rangaswami.

Allen and Overy has implemented social software, driven by Ruth Ward and colleagues, and aided by Headshift.

According to Lars Plougmann a major pharmaceutical firm he worked with created an intranet from a wiki, and generated user traffic that was so great as to be embarrassing to at least one guardian of a traditional, 'top-down', centrally-managed intranet in another organisation - especially since the wiki needed no maintenance.

I find it helpful to quote examples like this when trying to convince the sceptics that there might be value in all this. But, of course, that's OK for those organisations, isn't it, but we're different....