Wisdom of the Employees

Web 2.0 for the Enterprise: Wisdom of the Employees

Dan Farber is a fantastic editor/journalist at ZD Net who seems to have the ability to attend every significant tech gathering I go to. A blog post resulting from a panel he led at the Web 2.0 conference is so in line with my thinking that I’m not going to re-phrase it. I only wish I’d written it first:

It’s a major cultural shift for organizations governed by centralized command and control to allow usage of bottom up, lightweight, less costly, distributed, collaborative Web tools that offer more flexibility and less rigid work flows. Over time, the new generation coming into the workforce, who have grown up digitally, will force that cultural shift. Organizations that fail to embrace Enterprise 2.0 and facilitate it will get left behind by competitors who do.

What strikes me as the most important facet of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is applying collective intelligence–the wisdom of employees, partners and customers–to enterprises. This is the social networking piece, using corporate data, such as employee and customer profiles and directories, and user generated data–tags, voting, ranking, comments, feeds–to make connections, such as identifying people within a company with a particular expertise or rapidly forming ad hoc groups with the right set of people to solve a problem or even connecting people within a company or as part of a federated network who have shared interests.