Rich Hoeg just emailed to let me know that Honeywell is about to go live with its behind-the-firewall tagging capability (which is supplied by ConnectBeam). This will allow Honeywell employees to securely tag both Intranet and Internet content, to have relevant tags returned with (Google-powered) search results, and to see other users’ tag collections. Rich’s blog post provides more information and screen shots.
I’m really encouraged by this experiment for a couple reasons. First, it’s an attempt to use collective intelligence and network effects to make the Intranet more interconnected. The link structure of the Internet goes a long way toward accomplishing these goals, but as I’ve written before, most Intranet content isn’t very heavily interlinked, and the links that do exist are usually created by a few people – the people responsible for Intranet content – rather than by a broad, diverse population. Tags are potentially a way to deal with this problem, and to add after-the-fact emergent structure to Intranets.
Second, it’s an effort by a classic large, mainstream, ‘old economy’ company to embrace Enterprise 2.0 technologies and approaches. Honeywell is about as far away from Avenue A | Razorfish as possible — the former is a huge old manufacturing conglomerate, the latter is a Network Era interactive agency. Yet both have now embraced tagging as a way to let their employees help each other find relevant content (a group-level goal) while simultaneously organizing their online environments (an individual-level goal).
I’m very interested to learn how internal tagging progresses at Honeywell, and to hear of other similar initiatives. If you have good examples, please share them by leaving a comment.
{ 18 comments… read them below or add one }
Our company is working with a variety of mainstream, non web-based companies as beta testers of the main release of our service. I’ve found that no one is really enthused about the “Web 2.0″ concept alone, but when something hits a pain point and works well, they are interested. We don’t label ourselves as Enterpise 2.0, but our application centers around the principles of a platform-based, collaborative, and social environment.
Isn’t this interersting? Honeywell is one fof the companies named by Oracle in its lawsuit against SAP regarding maintenance…I wonder what this says about traditional companies’ overall attitudes towards innovation?
I’m skeptical about the value of these tools when the audience is limited to those behind the firewall.
Seems to me that if these tools are to serve their value in spawning ideation that people are going to want to network with individuals outside the firewall. I’m not seeing them wanting to maintain two sets of bookmarks based on the cohort.
What’s so secret about what a person might bookmark that requires a lack of transparency?
@Kevin,
I am struggling with the same issue and look for a solution for my Del.icio.us bookmarks to be fed into the bookmarking tool behind the firewall, for example based on a special tag (“formycompany”; some issues with that as well though).
Marcel,
May I invite you to take a look at our enterprise bookmarking system, Cogenz. It has del.icio.us integration in the form of import and simultaneous posting.
Sounds like the kind of thing you’re after.
Niall
If anyone from the BBC is reading this blog, perhaps you can tell us a bit about your behind the firewall del-icio-us-ing!
I heard a bit at Online in London in 2006 – would love an update.
Start w/ a disclosure — I’m with Connectbeam.
Kevin and Marcel — being able to bring del.icio.us bookmarks into Connectbeam is an important feature, yes. It’s on our product road map, and you can expect to see it soon. But, why would one limit it to a special tag? I.e. this is really an API issue, with the goal being to give the user maximum flexibility and capability.
Kevin — There are many solutions possible to the problem you raise, the need to network information w/ people outside of a pre-defined group. On the other hand, do you really have trouble imagining situations in which teams, workgroups, departments, and enterprises need to keep some information separate from the net as a whole?
Prof. Mcafee – you make an excellent point about the ability to enrich the link structure of intranet information via tagging. Additionally, there is the ability to bring intranet and Internet information together in a single context; this is extremely valuable and has been hard to do in the past.
I do like the posibilities and value these internal corporate social networking / tagging applications are able to offer. Our Dutch company is developing Operational Business Intelligence solutions, where we are incorporating tagging even on the level of business data which resides in underlying business apps. I did write a small post which touches the topic: http://operationalintelligence.blogspot.com/2007/03/system-integration-20.html
patent
This is very exiting to me to see a company like Honeywell participation in web 2.0 practices, it means a lot for the future of other companies to know that they are doing this.
Disclosure — I’m with BEA.
We recently announced an upcoming new product for social bookmarking, and like this discussion we see some applicable use cases both inside and across and the firewall. Some people will want to “bridge” multiple bookmarking systems to provide a federated social bookmarking capability with external or other internal bookmarking tools that will exist in a lot of companies over time.
To some of the questions here:
Larger companies can reach the internal number of people to use this type of solution to enable better access to information and expert identification, but there is a size of crowd needed which is where the access to external bookmarks could be very helpful. This is similar to the way people do federated search across internal and external sources. Connecting to external or third-party bookmarking systems is a future item.
For companies that are comfortable with the model of leveraging external bookmarking services or need the external crowd to gain a larger crowd population the ability to use multiple tools can better enable more users and
More about the Pathways social bookmarking product can be found on the bea.com website, or our en.terpri.se micro-site.
The biggest issue I see with Enterprise wide deployments is the lack of understanding of what it takes to get mass adoption within the organizational walls. In intranet has so many people involved that getting mass adoption isnÂ’t that big of an issue. Yet, if we use the metrics of Wikipedia where only 1% actually regularly update the information we get a huge challenge before us. Take a 100,000 employee (including contractors, consultants, and external partners) organization, 1% would mean 1,000 people which would be a good number. But remember, the 1% on Wikipedia wasnÂ’t over the entire population but Wikipedia registered users. So our 1% drops to 10 people. That wonÂ’t fly, you must understand the basic components of building mass adoption applications. We have a five tier model which includes: infrastructure, products and services, client-support, business processes, and communications. Drop just one element and you will fail in your effort. We have been able to get adoption rates of 30-40% after a couple of years. Most implementations fail to gain mass adoption so if you are experiencing this, your about average.
Yes, I agree there is an important point said about adoption. It is crucial to highlight the possibilities that employees can achieve with tagging. Also this may be the way to have better search results within the intranet and cut the costs of searching ducuments.
However you need also and appropriate tool and intranet infrastructure, which allows an effective tagging and visualization.
Yes, I agree there is an important point said about adoption. It is crucial to highlight the possibilities that employees can achieve with tagging. Also this may be the way to have better search results within the intranet and cut the costs of searching ducuments.
However you need also and appropriate tool and intranet infrastructure, which allows an effective tagging and visualization.
I agree that adoption of new possibilities of tagging are useful. But apart from intranet the social media network, taggs, lenses, blogs for employees can also be utilized to form a network in wider perspective which will not only help to have the real feedback but alos it prompt the companies to think about their products features and services.
This social networking media is not only cost effective but also very effective from the visibility point of view of companies on world wide web.
Search engines, no matter how good, means that the results are selected by a computer software that attempts to determine meaning while a list of bookmarks is the result of human action, people filter the sites they view and list links only to those sites that they think provide value.
Thanks!
amazing article
Woo this is a nice blog, i would love to read more.
Thanks
marshel
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