BinaryPlex - Filed under 'e2.0'

Evolution of E2.0

One of the things I love about Twitter is the short-thoughts you stumble across. A well crafted tweet is worth a thousand words perhaps?

Mike Gotta is the Enterprise 2.0 and Collaboration analyst at Burton and I've had occasional dealings with him in the past. He's always been insightful and provided some good background analysis to what's happening in the industry.

His tweet today caught my eye:

"process-centric collaboration is quite powerful - but not a new concept - "contextual collaboration" circa 1999 kicked that off"

It's amazing how a small phrase like this can spark a lot of thoughts.

I think process-centric collaboration is where it's at, particularly for this stage of the Enterprise 2.0 lifecycle. Does anyone remember Microsoft Works? To be honest I thought it was dead, but I see that it's still alive in into Version 9.0! If you've never heard of it, that's probably because the concept of a single monolithic suite to do spreadsheets, word processing etc. never really took off in business. Sure we have office suites, but these are branded products rather than an all-in-one deal. Why? I'm guessing that for all but the most trivial use cases, Microsoft Works didn't address business needs.

Now clearly you can't compare a modern E2.0 suite with Microsoft Works, still I wonder how this strategy plays out. Process centric collaboration doesn't neccessarily dictate a single tool, however I do believe tools geared to your critical business processes will be more effective.

So there's a thought - what is your critical business process and how would an Enterprise 2.0 tool align with this? In a lot of organisations, this is probably a Knowledge Management question and in my own experience and observations, I'd say that's where most people are looking to implement these tools. To get the knowledge of the organisation out of the inbox and to make it more accessible and discoverable.

I can summarise it like this, process centric collaboration is where I believe the real value in Enterprise 2.0 will be derived, the challenge in many organisations is that there will be multiple processes and probably multiple tools. HiveMind can help bridge the knowledge gap between the silos, cross-tagging and discovering expertise regardless of the process it's utilised in.

Expertise location across E2.0 is gaining momentum

Unless a large organization can bring the most relevant expertise within the firm to bear on the problems and issues at hand, it really has no reason to exist. A smaller more nimble organization could do as good a job with lower costs.

This is a problem that we are keenly aware of at BinaryPlex. Our personal experience is in large professional services firms where this problem is a very real one.

With the rapid growth of Enterprise 2.0 tools finding their way into large organisations, there is now scope for tools that mine this information to identify the key people based on the skills they demonstrate, not the skills they say they have. Using smart software that mines the expertise from documents, automated expertise locations tools could help organisation ensure that their people profiles are more accurate, up to date and contain information on what people really do rather than what they want to promote (although there is a place for both).

Enterprise Search solutions don't help in this environment because they target a different problem. They are very effective at indexing large amounts of content, but when searching, you are often returned large numbers of documents. This is typically one step away from what is needed for expertise location problems - I generally need to know who are the key people I need to speak to, not which document do I need to read.

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e2.0

Evolution of E2.0

Expertise location across E2.0 is gaining momentum