Hope this helps

Hope this helps

Most businesses had to rely on memos for inner office communication and direct mail for outer office communication. Post-it notes seemed to be common form of passing along memos within the office. Letterheads were also used, and still seem to be used quite a bit, to send letters updating business ties of new changes within the firm. Handwritten notes inside of note cards still are used to send individuals pieces of information, such as in the real estate business.

Before the digital age, letters and other printed forms of communication were the only way to keep in contact across a large firm and with prospective clients. And although Web 2.0 certainly has made communication a lot easier, too many businesses are relying solely on their blogs or SNS to keep in touch with weak ties, making their connections with some of those ties even weaker. Even today, a variety of communication methods is still very necessary and vital to keeping or strengthening lose ties.

And don’t forget the importance of user groups, customer forums and conferences. They’ve long served as a means to extract, and share, key information within specific industries/vertical markets — uniting people in 2nd and 3rd bullseye networks quite effectively and helping to grow/introduce new contacts to the network.

Michael Schultz
President, Message Infusion
http://www.messageinfusion.com

But I think you’re right that the E2.0 world represents something new under the sun. Only with the advent of the (nearly) ubiquitous and universal web has it been possible to use digital technology to extendour opportunities to establish new connections outside an IT silo and maintain them without physical travel, one-on-one networking, or traditional publication.

In the past I met often made new and serendipitous connections though direct referrals from existing colleagues, going to conferences, customer meetings, traveling to other offices, or reading papers and journals (primarily for research).

I think Enterprise 2.0 is significant because it supports new patterns of connection that: 1) extend far beyond traditional boundaries; 2) provide near-real time electronic connections that can be established by serendipitous discovery; 3) reinforce the value of old fashioned and irreplaceable face to face connections by letting people keep in touch with their extended network without creating undue work for either the sender or receiver.

Your bullseye model makes it easy to see that some strongly connected groups are intentional and not necessarily emergent – it’s no surprise that GM has groups who collaborate on designing a new car. However the relationships among groups and the weak and potential ties that connect individuals certainly meet your emergent criteria.

I particularly like how your rings make it easy to talk about connection strength and connection discovery as well as connection patterns. Here‘s an example.

Lotus Notes was a big part of knowledge sharing. Almost every client engagement ends in a sanitized (i.e. no confidential info or client names) internal practice document to capture learnings from the project (they factor into getting elected partner). Those documents (almost always Powerpoint) went in indexed Lotus Notes databases. By searching the databases, you might not find the specific knowledge you need, but from the document authors you could almost certainly find the internal experts you need to talk to.

What was missing was the frequency of small bits of info in blogs, as well as the editability and commentability of wikis. But most of the SNS capability was there.

One weakness of this example is that this metadata ceases to perform the role or facilitating weak links once the software developers move to different projects.