I did an interview with Stewart Manley, CTO of Mediasurface, yesterday. The company makes Content Management software for producing business websites, whether they be internet, intranet or extranet sites. Their customers tend to be quite heavyweight, such as the Environment Agency, NATO, Oxford University Press, and SSA Global. A far cry, in other words, from the typical Web 2.0 suspects.
We were talking about the ways in which elements found on consumer sites, such as flickr, are penetrating the business environment and changing organisations’ expectations of how the software should behave and the activities it should facilitate.
One interesting example is ‘folksonomy’. Our software has had the ability to add keywords and other meta-tags for years. But in a lot of cases these remained unused. Now we’re seeing considerably more interest. It’s my belief that people have gone out and used sites like flickr and experienced first hand the usefulness of tagging and the versatility it can bring to information management. They then bring that back into the workplace and have an expectation that they will tag items and that others will too.
But the change goes way deeper than that:
There seems to have been an increase in corporate agility. If you take a step back in time, companies used to talk about Knowledge Management, and they’d hire a Knowledge Manager. They did it in a top-down way. Now, there’s far more awareness that the creation of knowledge requires collaboration. Our focus in creating applications has become much more about enabling people to work together in shared spaces.
So people are asking for wikis and blogs? I suggest.
It’s ironic. Wikis and blogs tend to be viewed with suspicion by senior managers. They sound far too trendy and up-to-date. A lot of the corporates we deal with are still deciding whether to upgrade from Windows 98 to XP, so anything invented in the current decade is going to raise eyebrows.
At the same time, though, there is this trend to having more and more people within a business contributing to web applications. We may not call them wikis, but that’s what they are, effectively. There’s a lot more acceptance that people from across an organisation can contribute useful knowledge on a subject, even if that’s not their official area of expertise.
I’ve expressed some suspicion of the term Enterprise 2.0 before, and in some respects, what Stewart said endorsed that scepticism. Corporates are not likely to be hotbeds of revolutionary change. On the other hand, there’s a lot more going on in terms of attitudinal changes and approaches than even the managers of those organisations are aware of. It seems that so long as we don’t mention the dreaded ‘2.0′, things will move along just fine.
