(SAN
JOSE, CA) “Digital work became more social… but work has always been social,”
says Thomas Vander Wal, InfoCloud Solutions, addressing the KM World 2009
conference. “Businesses by nature are social – you need to have people in your
organization talking to each other.”
Drivers
of social media and enterprise 2.0 include:
- Office productivity tools are
not efficient for collaboration
- Social tools augment
face-to-face
- Volume of information has
grown
- Gaps in enterprise tools,
CMS, and other traditional work tools
- Individuals are making a difference
- Ease of sharing &
connecting with others
- Easier knowledge capture
“All of
this is similar to e-mail in the 1990s. It was a strange new way of thinking…
and now we’re using social tools and saying the same things that we did about
email," adds Vander Wal.
“Social
software creates a lot of information – many layers of information. We need
tools to understand this information and structure for understanding.”
Vander Wal cites the 1–9–90
rule (Charlene Li) that helps understand the ‘who’ in social media: 1% creates the
information; 9% curates it; 90% merely are consumers of the information.
SOCIAL
MEDIA ON THE INTRANET
“We’re
looking at our intranet and it’s an utter mess. Something is really broken
here,” says Thomas, emulating a typical intranet client. “Social media helps
fill in some of the gaps in the enterprise tools (example: BBC intranet: 115%
wiki use in 7 years).”
When
comparing Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Vander Wal has a clever analogy: Web 2.0
is like tunneling through a mountain (it’s tough to sort out the context in the
mass of information, and problems are merely small cracks in a large mass); Enterprise
2.0 is like tunneling under water (it’s easier to get started, but problems
quickly become massive problems). “Web 2.0 is about numbers of users,
Enterprise 2.0 is about % of users (% of employees using social media).”
Vander Wal encourages the need for "social comfort" for employees:
- Comfort with others (people
to interact & share with)
- Comfort with tools
- Comfort with subject matter
“It’s
been said that walled gardens are bad for the enterprise, but they give comfort
to employees,” says Vander Wal, citing Andrew McAfee’s opening keynote at KM
World 2009. “What we really want are comfortable walled gardens with permeable
walls.”
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Follow
Thomas on Twitter: www.Twitter.com/VanderWal
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Toby on Twitter: www.Twitter.com/TobyWard