INTO THE ENTERPRISE 2.0 WILDERNESS

In this blog post I will hope to clear some of the fog that lingers around the concept of enterprise 2.0 for most people, identify some examples of enabling technology and how this has been utilised in the wild.

Enterprise 2.0 is the utilisation of a set of technologies with strategy and intent in a way that makes today’s adopting business much more efficient and productive. It is the commercial crossover of web 2.0, but what is that? whats is web 1.0? They are hip new internet browsers. They are buzzwords and you should ignore them completely!

 I will start from the beginning

Web 1.0

The Internet evolved from a concept that started as a way to share data. After some very smart people figured out the transfer protocols (TCP/IP) to share data between two terminals it was harnessed to share static information. The information was authored by a select few and rarely altered, with the small user base being mainly information consumers rather than information creators as explained by Graham Cormode and Balachander Krishnamurthy (2008).

Think geocities pages in the mid 90’s. A few graphical elements on a page with information about a topic, looking like it had been designed by an overzealous preschooler. Lets us all take a moment to be thankful that these days are behind us.

Web 2.0

Fast forward to the early 2k’s. Mistakes had been made, the bubble had burst in a big way and people had realised something. The internet was not being leveraged to its full potential. A way to quickly and globally share information, any information we wanted, and we had static pages? Madness.

With this realisation came a new way of thinking about how we used the internets’ infinite potential. Pages began to have dynamic content, now we have information updated every second on pages. Graham Cormode and Balachander Krishnamurthy identify three main areas of difference between the two internet iterations. These are the scripting and presentation technologies, the structural and visual layout of sites and the sociological aspect (i.e how people interact) of the site.

In a nutshell it's the difference between the above example of a geocities page and Facebook. Facebook uses more than just html, it operates with the use of css, php, javascript, ajax and a few more I’m sure. Its design is considered and ever changing to fully cater to its customer base. Its purpose is to engage people and enable communication which it accomplishes successfully, and in doing so generates a healthy income.

Web 2.0 is not characterised by any major development in the technology that the internet runs on, it is the evolution of the way pages are constructed and how we use them as reiterated by Web 2.0.

Enterprise 2.0

Marcia Jedd (2008) sums up Enterprise 2.0 well, “its about sharing information, tools, and knowledge via the application of Web 2.0-like tools within the enterprise”. Enterprise 2.0 technologies include internal wiki’s, content tagging abilities, employee blogs and enterprise social networks. These tools, if implemented correctly with open creation and modification policies can enable much more efficient communication within an organisation than email alone.

Atlassian: Confluence

Atlassian describes their wiki focused package as, “one place to share, find, and collaborate on information ... to get work done... No email. No meetings. No problem”. After exploring some examples of confluence, I can best describe it as a digital collaborative space for an entire organisation. It eclipses the bandied around description of facebook for the corporate world. It incorporates wiki’s, blogs, tagging, document and development creation, messaging, searching and an accumulative knowledge base to centralise and organisation’s communication.

Powerhouse Museum

Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum have implemented Atlassian’s Confluence package to great effect. Dan Collins detailed the Powehouse Museum’s adpotion process whilst speaking to Atlassian. The Confluence package is used as an interactive knowledge space for employees to share knowledge, communicate and learn. It has replaced the previous intranet that was used, and in doing so removed the bottle necks for content creation that were experienced. The Museum’s employees now all contribute to internal blogs, keeping others updated with workflow as well as contributing to department blogs. These two processes are then used to develop exhibition concepts, “From Marketing to Workshop to Curators; it is used by all to build the content up for the exhibition”. It is worth noting that the powerhouse previously used internal wikis, and Dan explained the reason was that a large amount of documentation within the IT department needed to be stored. “I was frustrated that we continually kept creating new documentation within the department, and that our servers were always filled lots of outdated and bloated Microsoft Office documents”. The wiki model allowed for a “live” centralised, maintained and managed knowledge resource the for IT departments documentation.

NHL

The National Hockey League have also successfully implemented multiple atlassian products within their organisation including JIRA, Confluence and Crowd as detailed by Andrus Adamchik. They first implemented Atalssian’s JIRA bug tracking software. JIRA is a tracking and planning package that helps manage workflow and development within teams by allowing the users to organize issues, assign work, and follow team activity. Other companies that use JIRA include NASA, Ebay, Cisco and Adobe. The NHL were seeking a bug tracking software package in 2006 and elected to deploy JIRA within their development team, but have since rolled the product out organisation wide. Since the success of JIRA for their needs, the NHL then began using confluence as a way to connect their developers with their business people to take products and requirements from the inception stage through to completion with ease. Andrus details that the spread of use for confluence and JIRA were organic. Employees were not forced to use, rather left to their own devices to discover the benefits of efficient workflow and communication for themselves.

Why Enterprise 2.0?

Within a large organisation it can sometimes become like an information bermuda triangle where information is created but never to be seen again. Hard drives full of word document versions that no one ever reads or manages. The above technologies do away with this archaic practise through the use of the wiki’s. I will use Wikipedia’s definition of a wiki as a "web application which allows people to add, modify, or delete content in collaboration with others." The benefit of a wiki and how they can be used is explained well by the book Wikinomics which explores the concept of mass collaboration or Peering. Both The Powerhouse Museum and the NHL utilise Atlassian’s wiki package Confluence for its collaborative benefits. It allows them to leverage collective intelligence in a central forum and harness the power of mass collaboration. Both companies have overcome the problem of one hand not talking to the other.

Atlassian are not the only provider of Enterprise 2.0 software, but their confluence package is one which tackles the enterprise 1.0 problem in its entirety. I really enjoyed learning more about the ways in which Enterprise 2.0 technologies, especially Confluence, can help organisations communicate internally.

References

Cormode, G and B Krishnamurthy (2008). Key differences between web 1.0 and web 2.0. First Monday, 13(6). Retrieved from
http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2125/1972

Jedd M. (2008). Enterprise 2.0. Infonomics, 22(1), 26-29. Retrieved from
http://search.proquest.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/docview/216578720?pq-origsite=summon

Atlassian. (n.d.). Why Wiki Collaboration Software?. Retrieved 9 August 2015, from
https://www.atlassian.com/why-wiki-collaboration-software