Enterprise social software

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
It has been suggested that this article or section be merged with Social computing. (Discuss)

Enterprise social software refers to social software used in "enterprise" (business) contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to company intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication. In contrast to traditional enterprise software, which imposes structure prior to use, this generation of software tends to encourage use prior to providing structure.

Contents

[edit] Terminology

Enterprise 2.0 or Enterprise Web 2.0 are terms derived from Web 2.0 that are sometimes used to cover the introduction and implementation of such software, and the social and organizational changes related to its use. The former term was coined by Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School[1] in the Spring 2006 MIT Sloan Management Review.[2][3][4]

[edit] Enterprise use of Web 2.0

Specific Web 2.0 and social computing tools that have been adapted for enterprise use include:

[edit] Applications of Enterprise social software

Enterprise 2.0 social networking capabilities can help organizations capture unstructured tacit knowledge as part of their Knowledge Management strategy. The challenge then becomes how to distill meaningful, re-useable knowledge from the other content also captured in tools like Blogs, Wikis and TWikis.

From: IDC's Whitepaper on Consumerizing the Enterprise. Web 2.0 in the workplace has so far been limited for the most part to the notion of enhanced content creation and sharing. One example is using a blog to add a human interactive touch to a vendor/customer or management/employee relationship. Another example is using a wiki to create central repositories of information to which any employee can contribute, thereby bringing to light previously hidden but useful information. But blogs and wikis are collaboration tools, and as such, they are useful mainly for sharing unstructured information associated with ad hoc or ongoing projects and processes, but not for structured informational retrieval.

On the other hand, most business processes rely on access to the appropriate structured data in real-time, or near real-time. These information pieces are spread across many enterprise applications, databases, and directories. Furthermore, because information is stored in different locations, the relation between the data is not obvious, and is usually only well understood by the information workers themselves.

Web 2.0 technologies might offer considerable efficiency potential to the enterprise relating to accessing structured information. For example, RSS allows users to define their own information "feeds" from data stored in corporate applications. Efficient use of RSS will essentially redefine how information is located and consumed in the enterprise. Another interesting development is the application mashup, a type of composite application. A mashup is a custom application that provides the context for merged data residing in multiple sources. Mashups also provide rich user interfaces that address the need for the worker productivity by making it easier to find and use the information that a worker needs for a particular task or role.

Through the adoption of Web 2.0 technology, information workers, like their consumer counterparts, will control their own user experience with more or less guidance from IT, and hence create for themselves the most intuitive and efficient work environment. The end result is improved worker productivity, morale and customer satisfaction.

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Official page: [1].
  2. ^ McAfee, Andrew (2006). ("Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration", MIT Sloan Management Review Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 21-28.)
  3. ^ The US Service Mark (serial number: 78893454) owned by Alvin Chang of Oakland, CA was filed on May 25, 2006; it seems to apply to the fields of business and educational conferences and provision of educational services related to Enterprise 2.0.
  4. ^ See also the related Web 2.0 Trademark Controversy.

[edit] External links

[edit] On Wikis in particular

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../e/n/t/Enterprise_social_software.html"