SALT LAKE CITY, UT -- 12/11/07 --
Burton Group, an IT research firm
focused on enterprise infrastructure technologies, published a report that
recommends how Enterprise 2.0, a collection of organizational and IT
practices, can help businesses achieve better performance and address human
capital management needs.
In the report, "Enterprise 2.0: Collaboration and Knowledge Management
Renaissance," principal analyst Mike Gotta says the growing business focus
on innovation and growth, coupled with nontraditional workplace
expectations from next-generation employees, are forcing organizations to
look at Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) as more than a catchphrase.
"Business strategists are rethinking the fundamentals of work -- how works
gets done -- how work should be organized -- the culture necessary to
catalyze innovation -- and the workplace environment necessary to attract
and retain the best talent. These trends are transforming past assumptions
about how to approach collaboration and knowledge management efforts," says
Gotta.
Burton Group believes successful Enterprise 2.0 efforts will help
organizations establish flexible work models, visible knowledge-sharing
practices, and higher levels of community participation. In the report,
Gotta highlights four key design qualities that are essential for
Enterprise 2.0 success:
Personal Value:
People have their own reasons for participating in social applications. The
system should reciprocate by supporting the personal value needs of that
individual. For example, social bookmark systems make it easy for users to
assign their own meaning (via tags) to information and categorize
information in a manner that makes sense to them.
Emergent:
Participation within a social application is often informal, but that type
of serendipity can become the catalyst for brainstorming, problem solving,
and innovation. For example, XML feeds allow "many eyes" to monitor changes
made to blogs or wikis. Removing inappropriate walled gardens enables a
higher level of transparency that can deliver organizational insight and
feedback to blog authors or wiki editors. To encourage contributions, the
system should be as transparent as possible, impose few rules (adhering to
security or compliance demands), and limit assumptions based on
preconceived roles. Lowering barriers to participation will generate
exponential values interactions grow across permissioned members.
Communal:
The system should enable joint ownership, information sharing, relationship
building, and support multiple levels of trust (e.g., via permission
models). For example, a wiki becomes a more credible resource if it has
passionate contributors, objective editors, and an open vehicle to resolve
content debates. A social network site becomes a more credible resource
when it has governance mechanisms allowing people to manage their persona
and relationship information. The system must capture data about what goes
on within the community then make combinations of that data available to
other participants based on permission models and in the context of a given
activity.
Platform Centric
Fragmentation of social applications across disconnected infrastructure
limits value (e.g., integration, overlap, and conflicting tools or
incompatible plug-ins). Design constructs implemented in a
platform-centric manner exploit centralization of data and metadata and
analysis of that information. Strategists should look at the openness of a
platform as well as the ecosystem of other products and services around it
when assessing Enterprise 2.0 solutions.
In a complimentary Burton Group TeleBriefing, principal analyst Mike Gotta facilitates a discussion
on the challenges and benefits of social media in the enterprise with Anil
Dash, chief evangelist of Six Apart, and Chris Howard, VP and director of
Burton Group.
About
Burton Group
Since 1990, Burton Group (www.burtongroup.com) has provided research and
advisory services helping Global 2000 organizations make smart enterprise
architecture decisions. Burton Group provides a suite of context-oriented
analysis and a proprietary IT Reference Architecture covering security,
identity management, application platforms, service-oriented architecture,
network and telecom, collaboration, content management, and the data
center. Uniquely focused on the need of IT buyers rather than technology
providers, 85% of Burton Group's revenue comes from end-user organizations.
Contact:
Amie Johnson
Email Contact
801-304-8136
