Web 2.0 for the Enterprise

While several sites and technologies based on Web 2.0 concepts have become mass phenomena (for example blogs, Wikipedia, Flickr, etc), within businesses the use of Web 2.0 technologies and concepts is still in the early stages, even though these technologies offer considerable opportunities for knowledge management, communications and human resources.

Sharing information - wikis

Most obviously, opportunities for the profitable use of collaborative content generation lie in the field of knowledge management. The basic question is: Why is the production of organisational knowledge (embodied in manuals, policies, written best practices and so on) often strictly separated from its consumption? Or, to put it another way: Aren't the users of a manual often its most competent and knowledgeable authors?

Although the attempt is frequently made, it seems to be very difficult to motivate employees to document their work in sufficient quality and quantity. However, the Wikipedia project has demonstrated that people will voluntarily assemble a vast mass of knowledge without any extrinsic motivation. Is this possible within a company by introducing an internal wiki? Yes, but the preconditions are different:

• Documenting knowledge is of little use for a company if the results lack reliability. In contrast to Wikipedia, correcting errors cannot be left to the rest of the community in the hopes that somebody someday will do the job. Therefore, information must be associated with a credible source, via the author's (or "page overseer's") rank or area of expertise. To create trust in the information, readers must know the source.
• Many kinds of information have a short life-cycle and are subject to frequent change. Use of a wiki must be combined with processes that ensure that information does not become obsolete. Since it is generally not feasible to assign staff to continuously monitor the relevance of each wiki article, this process should be automated, for example by triggering notifications to an article owner or overseer when an article is unchanged for a specified period of time. Another mechanism could be assigning a status of "final" when an article is complete, combined with technically preventing further changes. Automatic notice to an owner or overseer whenever changes are made can also raise the level of responsibility the employee feels for the article.
• Rights management is a key issue with corporate wikis. First, information access policies within the organisation must be followed. Therefore, the wiki software must provide multi-level rights both for read and write access. In addition, different kinds of pages need different kinds of access policies. For example, fully collaborative "Q & A" pages might allow global read and write access, enabling everyone to contribute. At the same time, reference pages might have very limited write access, but might have associated comment or discussion pages that allow broader write access. The software platform must allow for the granular specification of access rights for every piece of content.
• Introducing a corporate wiki is a large project that requires support throughout the organization, with the management team setting the example. Use of a wiki can also be encouraged via an incentive model that rewards employees for sharing or updating information. However, the question of whether users are better motivated by intrinsic or extrinsic methods has not been answered yet and is the subject of academic research. Wikipedia works successfully without material rewards; therefore, trusting in the employees' tendency to share knowledge in order to gain reputation appears to be the proper way for now.
• Information classification and retrieval can be supported by "tagging". Each user can assign keywords to any content object. These are automatically stored as personal bookmarks. When other users look for information, they can find it by searching through existing "tags". The concept is based on the assumption that a search engine cannot recognise every context where a piece of information is useful. This use of collective intelligence provides another classification structure for information. The number of instances of each tag assigned to a piece of content indicates the content's relative relevance to the tag.
• By monitoring individual activity levels on the system, human resources staff can identify users who have specific knowledge and are willing to share. This information can be used to choose the right person for a task, or to improve the organisational flow of information by systematically mentoring those who demonstrate potential.