What is enterprise2.0? Five pillars for efficient knowledge sharing

10.06.2007 | Christian Kreutz

Imagine you can share your bookmarks with your colleagues, find your documents and emails quickly through tagging, write about your work experiences on your personal homepage (blog), and document all project team work in a wiki. The result is a revolutionary different way to share knowledge online within an organization.

How does it work and what is the trick? It simply needs to combine the already existing and freely available tools or open source applications in web.2.0.

The marker: Tagging Tagging simply means to add key words to every link you save or blog entry you write. Basically you don't sort anymore all your different files in hierarchical folders, you know anyhow that this is never perfectly possible. Because knowledge has always many domains e.g. a single article contains all sorts of information, each reader has a different perspectives on it. Through tags you can see where topics are overlapping and find information from different angles.

network explorerThe network: Social Bookmarking Imagine your bookmarks are visible to your colleagues. You would be able to share links on similar working areas and browse via tags all imaginable topics of your organization. These links have a great value, because they are verified or even commented by your colleagues. So you find easily like minded people and identify quickly who works on a certain theme.

The storyteller: Blogging How often have you answered to the same question over again? Why don't you make a blog post about it, so all your colleagues with the same problem could find answers in your blog. How can you exchange information without having to send a mass email? Post it on a project blog which documents the learning process of how a project has developed over time. Blogs can also become information boards, picturing the life of organizations.

  • My blog post about Sun blogging
  • Bookmarking, tagging, and social software comes to the Enterprise (nice podcast)

The white board: Wiki Remember how you used to send word files around while working collaboratively on a text? Now you can have a wiki to include your project documentation in, and everyone on your team can access it form anywhere. On the Wiki, you can see how a text develops over time and browse through the organizational knowledge via tags. With a Wiki, while your team works on a memo during a meeting, you can also link topics to other relevant sources. Thus you keep track of the team work.

The connector: Feed/RSS RSS is a universal format for files which gives you, on the contrary to email, the power to filter information. A colleague always writes interesting blog posts which are relevant to your work. You want to share links in a comunity of practice, or you need to follow up certain projects. Via feeds you can subscribe to the information relevant to you. Feeds keep you posted with all sort of information, such as links, documents, audio, video, wiki changes, etc.

Why all of this? What is the advantage?

  • Simply because it connects in manifold ways all available resources and people behind it.
  • It makes everybody's work transparent and offers new potential for sharing and cooperation.
  • It is very easy to use. Just look how many blogs are out there and see how successful flickr, youtube and delicious are.
  • It turns communication and knowledge sharing upside down and emphasizes on expertises.

Is this realistic? Does it make an intranet obsolete? What do you think? There are of course many challenges, but I will write about it in another post.

Check out also out this nice presentation on enterprise2.0.