i am really biased at your questions . may be full of confusing thoughts.

Regards, Elmira

Great material and thanks for sharing sir!

Best,

Dion Hinchcliffe

We’ve had a tremendous amount of success selling to this organizational pain. Our product is a platform of E2.0 technologies focussed on salespeople and the knowledge workers (product managers, marketing, sales operations, etc.) that support them.

From reading the notes I’ve noticed two things. First, E2.0 seems to be boiled down almost exclusively to the usage of blogs and wikis. Wikis are mentioned all over, I mean, wikis to track portfolio companies? Plus, the approach seems rather naive, as if wikis were something that can be adopted overnight, and always succesfully independently from enterprise culture. In my opinion E2.0 also includes integrating all the information silos in the company, with technologies like web services, giving real meaning to the enterprise search concept, centralizing the access to enterprise content in one web-like entry point.

The second thing is, all the provided examples seem to be based on explicit content generation, and while I know you are fond of it, implicit content can also be leveraged in the corporate environment, I’m thinking about usage, and audit logs to help understand what is the most visited/used content in the enterprise, to help understand where is the value, enabling more advanced ordering and filtering features, like top visited corporate blog entries, users who used this document also used…, recommended content techniques, etc.

I’d argue that what your students want is Enterprise 3.0, not Enterprise 2.0, but this might be a matter of semantics, speaking of which …

Semweb (the Semantic Web) may be the core tech to tie together much of what your students proposed. Among the three leaders in the semweb horse race, Metaweb (Freebase, as in “free database,” not as in “crack cocaine”), Radar Networks (Twine) and Powerset, Radar Networks has developed the only application that is addressing the wants and needs highlighted by your students.

How Twine is doing, circa May 6, 2008 ::

“Capturing and Sharing Knowledge” – A
“Finding Information, Expertise & People” – B-
“Arriving at Better Answers” – C+
“Improving Efficiency & Speed” – B-

Where I expect Twine to be, circa May 6, 2009 ::

“Capturing and Sharing Knowledge” – A+
“Finding Information, Expertise & People” – A-
“Arriving at Better Answers” – B
“Improving Efficiency & Speed” – B+

Of course, my grading is highly subjective. However, I have been the number one ranked Twinerian since they opened their private beta last October: I’ve added the most items, have joined the most twines, manage the most twines, have the most connections, have the most active twine not managed directly by Radar Networks (my “Apps: On Semantic Web & Related Applications” twine). So, my grades come from experience, not a few weeks or days playing around with twine. Note: Twine is still in a private beta, so it’s a little rough around the edges. But even in private beta, it’s an impressive tool.

BTW, Andrew, I’m moderating the “Rising Stars of the Semantic Web” keynote/panel at the forthcoming 2008 Semantic Technology Conference. (See http://www.semantic-conference.com/session/678/ .) I’ve instructed the panelists to read this post and that it’s fair game for a question. The heads of Radar Networks (Nova Spivack) and Powerset (Barney Pell) are among the panelists.

Finally, if any of your readers would like an invitation to Twine, I’ll send them an invite. david a+ semwebevangelist d-t com.

I’m currently in this hypothetical situation – as an intern, with the authority to design and implement the knowledge management system at a startup with a rapid growth agenda.

However, as valuable as this post is, it doesn’t address what will likely be my biggest challenge: achieving buy-in. Even starting with a small team, it will be difficult to get my company to really embrace the spirit of a wiki company-wide. It’s not going to be enough to make it mandatory, or to make it really convenient. Employees are going to need to see tangible short and long-term benefits…and this is going to be difficult to demonstrate given that wikis become most valuable after a large base of information is already in place (I guess it’s the increasing marginal utility of information – ever successive piece gives more meaning to the whole).

As a net-native, this is an intuitive truth to me. But even for seasoned MBAs and experienced salespeople, it can be difficult to accept.

I know there are plenty of bloggers posting about this issue already, but I suppose it’s a problem that most companies really need to feel out for themselves.

What are some of the best ways you have found to aggregate and measure information contributed by a flat organization that limit distractions at the top, but also allow the important things contributed at the bottom to flow up quickly?

I think we all need to improve visablity, it is imperative in a highly functioning organization, but it is also important to focus our time wisely.

What are some of the ways Enterprise 2.0 tools are helping us strike a balance?