Enterprise social software
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Enterprise social software, also known as Enterprise 2.0, is a term describing 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.
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[edit] Terminology
The term 'enterprise social software' is a general term for describing this class of tools. As of 2006, Enterprise 2.0 is a catchier term sometimes used to describe social and networked changes to enterprise, which often includes social software (but is not limited to it, nor to either social collaboration or software); and Enterprise Web 2.0 sometimes describes the introduction and implementation of Web 2.0 technologies within the enterprise including those rich internet applications, providing software as a service, and using the web as a general platform.
[edit] Applications of enterprise social software
[edit] Software examples
Specific social software tools that have been adapted for enterprise use include hypertext and unstructured search tools, wikis, weblogs for storytelling, social bookmarking for tagging and building organizational folksonomies, RSS for signaling, collaborative planning software for peer-based project planning and management, ideas banks for ideation (idea generation), social networking tools, mashups for visualization, and even prediction markets for forecasting and identifying risks.
Social networking capabilities can help organizations capture unstructured tacit knowledge. The challenge then becomes how to distill meaningful, re-usable knowledge from other content also captured in tools such as blogs, online communities, and wikis. In 2008, companies that provide Enterprise Social Software, started introducing profile pages to their products, to integrate the functionality of public online communities, within the enterprise. This enables knowledge workers to find others with the knowledge they may need. This is especially useful in large organizations.
[edit] Specific uses
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. However, Shell is converting its official documentation to wiki's, because this enables the company to make documentation updates available in real time. And enable non-editors to contribute to the documentation. In this process they restructure the paper documents to a set of on line wiki pages.
Business processes often rely on access to structured data. This may be spread across many applications, databases, and directories. Social technologies work to address such complexities.
The unstructured information provided by social technologies is particularly useful in business processes that are not rigidly pre-defined, but where people work together in an adaptive way to innovate solutions. The theory of such processes is human interaction management, and there is an associated type of software known as a Human Interaction Management System (HIMS). A HIMS can be used to provide management control over the use of social software.
Ironically Law, which many view as a field where professionals are highly un-collaborative, may prove to be among the first places to embrace Web 2.0 in the enterprise, because lawyers manage intensive document collaboration, and sit in both large legal departments in corporations and outside law firms.
[edit] References
- Web 2.0 in the Enterprise, The Architect Journal
- Social Computing Magazine
- Web 2.0 for the Enterprise an article in Boxes and Arrows
- The 3/2 Rule of Employee Productivity, financial research a building business case (when you add 10% employees the profitability of each drops by 6.3%)
- Writable Intranet, from khaitan.org
- "List of tools for the internal blogosphere" from scalefree.info
- Stenmark, D. (2005). "How intranets differ from the web: organisational culture's effect on technology". Proceedings of ECIS2005, Regensburg, Germany, 26-28 May 2005.
- Enterprise 2.0 - The Collaborative Technologies Conference - held annually in June in Boston.
- Karim R. Lakhani and Andrew P. McAfee, Case study on deleting "Enterprise 2.0" article, Courseware #9-607-712, Harvard Business School, 2007 (GFDL) -- a case study on discussions surrounding the proposed deletion of an article which was merged into this page.
- Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, MITSloan Management Review, Spring 2006. The article in which McAfee introduced the term "Enterprise 2.0" to widespread use.
- Enterprise 2.0: The New, New Knowledge Management? by Tom Davenport, Harvard Business Online, Feb. 19, 2008.
- Willms Buhse and Sören Stamer: Enterprise 2.0: Die Kunst, loszulassen. Rhombos-Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 3938807687 (in German).
[edit] On Wikis in particular
- "Wikis evolve as collaboration tools" - InfoWorld Jan 2007 review of Wiki products designed for enterprise use
- An enterprise panel on the organizational uses of wiki technology, from Wikimania 2006.
- McAfee, Andrew (2006). Wikis at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein: (A), (B), (C) (9-606-074), HBSP