Podcasts Technology Gordon And Mike's ICT Podcast Enterprise 2.0 [22:30]

Enterprise 2.0 [22:30]

Published: Sept. 3, 2007, 11:59 p.m.

b'Intro:\\nBusiness and Industry continues to implement Web 2.0 technologies to\\nmake things run faster and more efficiently. In this podcast we discuss\\nthe use of these technologies by various corporations.


\\nGordon: Mike - you\'ve been doing some reading and poking around in this\\narea over the summer - can you give us a list of some of your favorite\\nreferences?

Mike: I\'ve been reading Wikinomics by by Don Tapscott (Author), Anthony D. Williams (Author)\\n\\n\\n

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\\nGordon: Mike - can you give any info on specific companies implementing these technologies?

Mike:
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\\n At Procter & Gamble, The Good And Bad Of Web 2.0 Tools\\n

\\nBy J. Nicholas Hoover
\\n InformationWeek
\\n Jun 23, 2007 12:02 AM (From the June 25, 2007 issue)
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\\n Business technology execs at the Enterprise 2.0 conference\\nin Boston June 18-21 to explore integrating Web 2.0 technologies into\\ntheir enterprises. A.G. Lafley, CEO of Procter & Gamble, is pushing\\nimproved internal and external collaboration primarily to develop new\\nproducts faster. Leading this effort is Joe Schueller, innovation\\nmanager in P&G\'s Global Business Services. Schueller makes an\\ninteresting observation that email is the biggest barrier to employee\\nuse of more interactive and effective tools.
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\\nAs a sender of an e-mail, I control the agenda of everyone around me.\\nE-mailers decide who has permission to read a message, and the Reply To\\nAll button ensures that peripheral participants will be prompted long\\nafter they have lost all interest. Blogs, in contrast, beg for comments\\nfrom those most interested.

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P&G provides a study of how Enterprise 2.0\\nwill take shape given the scope of its project and the way it draws on\\ntools from startups as well as big-name vendors.
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Video from conference -\\xa0 Open/Download MP4
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\\n\\nPPT from conference -\\xa0 Open/Download PPT

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Gordon: What kinds of tools and applications are they using?

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Mike: Starting in 2005, P&G began a Microsoft-centric collaboration initiative, with
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  • \\n instant messaging,
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  • \\n unified communications, and
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  • \\n presence;
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  • \\n Web conferencing; and
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  • \\n content management and collaboration.\\xa0\\n
\\n\\n\\n \\nAbout 80,000 employees use Microsoft IM, and 20,000 have moved to\\nOutlook. P&G has a few SharePoint sites running, and the major\\nrollout started in August. \\n

\\n Now moving to offer employees a more diverse toolset.

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Gordon: Are they doing any blogging?

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Mike: Movable Type blogging software, which employees have used to create hundreds of blogs, including ones\\n

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  • \\n by the VP of design\\n
  • \\n by the public relations department on how to discuss company issues externally; and
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  • \\n by Schueller, read mostly by IT folks.
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\\nGordon: How about social networking?

Mike: Plans to launch social networking intended to make it easier to find people with needed expertise.

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Gordon: Have they tried any of the integrated\\nplatforms? For example, the first one that comes to my mind is\\nMicrosoft\'s Community Server - a product that integrates many of the\\nWeb 2.0 based tools into a single platform.

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Mike: Companies are finding monolithic solutions/platforms from\\nbig players like Microsoft and IBM inadequate, even as they add support\\nfor\\xa0blogs, wikis, and calendar sharing, instead their focus is on\\nmodular, flexible solutions and even the openness to IT also needs to\\nlearn how to incorporate tools employees bring in themselves, he says.

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\\nGordon: How about enterprise search - Google has their appliance - how is that working?

Mike: Enterprise\\nsearch - such as Google\'s search appliance - is another tool companies\\nare using to find and share information - unfortunately, P&G has\\nfound this sort of keyword-based search limited. The solution - sharing\\nbookmarks and tagging articles, pages, and documents with descriptive\\nwords, using a product from Connectbeam that works with Google\'s search appliance - integrating tags and bookmarks\\xa0 with Google search results.

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Gordon: What else are they doing with their web portal?

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Mike: Additionally, their Web portal is being redesigned to include news and business RSS\\nfeeds and allow employees to\\xa0personalize the portal - future plans\\ninclude the ability to suggest feeds for employees based on their roles\\nand their Web history.

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Gordon: We know on the\\nacademic side it can be a hard sell to some employees who are pretty\\nfixed in their ways. How are big companies encouraging their employees\\nto use these applications?

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Mike: The challenge -\\ngetting people to use these tools, that many view as extra work -\\nemployees who see anything other than e-mail as an addition to their\\nworkloads. The approach is to try to integrate these tools into\\nemployees existing workflow, with the goal of simplifying the process.

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Gordon: P&G is one big company! Are there others moving in the same direction?

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Mike: P&G\\nis not alone - others jumping on the Enterprise 2.0 bandwagon include\\nBank of America, Boeing, the Central Intelligence Agency, FedEx, Morgan\\nStanley, and Pfizer. As part of an initiative called Intranet 2.0,\\nMotorola has 4,400 blogs, 4,200 wiki pages, and 2,600 people actively\\ndoing content tagging and social bookmarking.

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\\n Motorola employees also can more easily find people with experience in specific areas using social networking software\\nfrom Visible Path or checking author pages on wikis. "It actually lets\\npeople see new relationships--to see maps of what smart people and like\\npeople have done," says Toby Redshaw, Motorola\'s VP in charge of\\nEnterprise 2.0 technologies. The result is that the company is building\\nknowledge centers around particular problems and products.

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That\'s the end goal for Schueller--that\\nemployees and partners searching for information on the intranet,\\ncreating profiles, tagging documents, and sharing bookmarks make the\\ncontent more valuable.
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