Great post. i do agree with your ideas.

Rina

I think my very post illustrates why not. Who am i? what are my credentials?

Legal and medical topics on the internet illustrate this point. Yes, maybe John Doe knows why im hacking up blood or what my rights are during an illegal search, but wouldn’t i be more likely to find the answer I’m looking for by questioning just doctors or just lawyers?

Sort of reminds me of dealing with my father-in-law. hes an “expert” on everything. sometimes i just prefer my doctors diagnosis instead of his.

Would you say that organizations that have a large investment in customer care can benefit from E2.0 in the same way? I tend to think of several thousand Customer Service Representatives as an army of zombies that has a huge collective IQ that is very hard to tap. These guys are usually fed information with a spoon and their time expenditure is closely monitored. And yet they own a lot of knowledge regarding what customers want, how customers feel, what’s working vs. what’s not working etc.

I can envision a CSR adding clarifications on a corporate wiki after finding out answers for a customer. I find it hard to envision anyone letting that same CSR editorial access to the knowledge management system in the first place.

I’m wondering if and when managers will take the leap and implement E2.0 technologies for CSRs, bank clerks and others and whether accountability will help them make this decision (seeing as accountability is possible thanks to strong authentication within the corporate network). It’s interesting to think that accountability can be a powerful tool for implementing E2.0 considering that it has a much smaller role in the proliferation of Web 2.0, though one is an offshoot of the other.

I’m slightly off topic, so I think I’ll stop here.

Itamar, as for attention allocation, I feel strongly that this fits into the normal run of business. In my experience, people didn’t get side-tracked from their day job, they used their normal coffee, water-cooler, smoke break(!), waiting for edits to render, moments to dip into the Q&A going on in our discussion system to catch Andrews ‘Broadcast Searches’. One of the most heated debates in our system came when someone accused all the other users of ‘not doing their jobs because they were always in the discussion forums’. This led to a spate of people adding their current activities to their postings, which revealed that they fitted their posting around their normal work. Remember also the lurkers to writers ratio that seems pretty common across all these sorts of systems, in my experience it seemed to hold true inside the organisation too. When it came to blogs and wikis, people are much more selective and will build their own information footpaths, optimising their own attention, either because they find a useful resource that helps them with their work, or because they find an interesting individual who writes about the business in a revealing way.

Andrew, I so wish you had trackback enabled

As I see it, the biggest question is of attention allocation. In order for broadcast search to be effective, you need many (all?) people to browse through all published searches. When does the collective time expenditure by employees on blogs wikis and the like reduce productivity to an unacceptable level? How do we optimize attention expenditure of E2.0 vs. “traditional” work (I recognize the fact that there are places where those two overlap)? I’d love to have answers to those questionsÂ…