Enterprise 2.0 – the application of Web 2.0 technologies in a corporate context – is still in its infancy in Switzerland. The step from leisure activity to productive tool is off to a sticky start.

Read more at Unic.com Magazin…

Via GlobeCorp.

A June survey released by Facetime, makers of a gateway appliance for managing Web 2.0 applications, revealed the growing popularity of social networking applications in the workplace. Out of 1199 survey respondents, all IT professionals, there were more who felt that social networks played an important role in the business world than those who didn’t. What’s more, it appears that the IT folks are now seemingly OK with providing access these networks behind the firewall - even those that don’t approve of their use!

Read more at ReadWriteWeb…

Want to see good examples of corporate blogs? Check out the blogs of the Blog Council. This site includes blogs by Coke, Cisco, General Electric, Intel, and the Mayo Clinic.

Via Alltop News and Updates.

Via AdsVark.

“Since their early days, weblogs have been envisioned as a prototype technology for enabling grass-roots knowledge management. However, while experiments with blogging are underway in many businesses, research that could inform them is limited. In this dissertation early adopters of weblogs are studied to develop an understanding of uses of weblogs in relation to work, and to provide insights relevant to introducing blogging in knowledge-intensive environments.

This research focuses on describing the blogging practices of knowledge workers. It is guided by a framework that provides a view of what knowledge work entails and includes tasks, the essence of one’s work, and enabling personal knowledge management activities, such as developing one’s knowledge and relationships over time.”

Read more at Mathemagenic…

A poll of 524 white-collar workers commissioned by fin­ancial comms agency FD has found worryingly high levels of employee dissatisfaction facing businesses bosses as they adjust to the economic downturn.

YouGov found that a minority of employees (44 per cent) felt their CEO showed strong, decisive leadership and only 28 per cent trusted messages from their CEO more than ‘a little’.

Only 15 per cent of respondents felt that their employer had communicated news about job security ‘very well’, with 37 per cent saying that the communi­cation had been poor or non-existent.

Read more at PRWeek… (via Geneva Communicators Network)

Despite their relative newness, companies are embracing Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking tools, blogs and webcasts for internal communications and as part of their overall technology mix, according to a new survey by Watson Wyatt, a leading global consulting firm.

Watson Wyatt’s 2009 HR Technology Trends Survey found that since the economic downturn began, 72 percent of employers have increased their use of the intranet and 61 percent have increased their use of e-mail to communicate with employees. Employers are also using newer tools – a third (32 percent) have increased their use of webcasts; 13 percent have increased their use of social networking tools; and 12 percent have increased their use of blogs for communication. Watson Wyatt’s survey was conducted in February and March 2009 and includes responses from 181 large employers.

“Web 2.0 technologies work well, in most instances, for targeting specific employee and manager groups, and companies are using them in appropriate situations. Using tools such as role-based portals, internal blogs and webcasts ensures that both managers and employees can send and receive tailored messages in an engaging format. This is useful for improving productivity and maintaining employee morale and engagement, particularly in this difficult economic time.” Jon Osborne, senior technology consultant at Watson Wyatt

Read more…

Part I - The Wikipedia Myth

Part II - People at the Center

Part III - Getting started

The 2009 survey shows that there is great reputational risk associated with social networking as 74 percent of those surveyed believe it is easy to damage a brand’s reputation via sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

As this medium is evolving, there are different opinions about use and access. For example, 60 percent of business executives say they have the “right to know” how employees portray themselves and their organizations online, while 53 percent of the employees contend that “social networking pages are none of an employer’s business.”

So what should business leaders do? One option is to establish policies and protocols. However, nearly half of the respondents say that such guidelines will not change how they behave in cyberspace. Therefore, organizations should emphasize culture, values, and ethics in order to mitigate reputational risk in these online communities.

Read more…

Update: on Slideshare (via Demain la veille)

Stowe Boyd interviewed Jordan Frank (hi Jordan ) of Traction Software, one of the - if not the - first web based collaboration platforms for the enterprise. Themes discussed including some very interesting insights: enterprise 2.0 vs web 2.0, personal vs professional contributions and microstreaming.

Via Enterprise 2.0 blog.

Jeremiah Owyang, a leading social media thinker at Forrester Research, took some time with Stowe Boyd to share observations about the state of practice and the future of enterprise 2.0.

Via Enterprise 2.0 blog.

Stowe Boyd connected with Charlene Li, of the Altimeter Group and the co-author of Groundswell, and she gave some insights to the state of Enterprise 2.0.

Via Enterprise 2.0 blog.

Blogging has moved away from a niche activity to such an extent that it has spawned it’s own service industry. There are numerous activities and companies supporting the blogger.

The market is huge, with hundreds of millions of blogs in existence and thousands more being created each day, there is an insatiable need for blogging skills, something the experienced blogger can use to their financial advantage.

Read more at ProBlogger…

Stowe Boyd interviews the famous Andrew McAfee, the person who first used the term Enterprise 2.0 a few years back. Andrew, again, makes some very sensible comments about the state of Enterprise 2.0 in 2009.

I particularly liked his point - towards the end of the interview (14:30 or so) - about the borders of Enterprise 2.0 environments, knowing that, in general, companies tend to create multiple small internal closed communities with no possible interaction or cross-linking between each one of them.

“There’s a tendency when you set them up that way, I think, for people to work inside those relatively constrained environments and not to be really open and inviting to other people to participate in that. A contrasting approach is to say: we’re gonna cast the net as wide as possible for input and ideas and participance in whatever we’re trying to acomplish here and to have these technologies be as inherently big and borderless as possible. I find myself with a preference for the latter because you don’t know where the expertise necessarily is going to lie and I think that the risks of being very broad and open are minimal, are a lot lower than most people think.” Andrew McAfee

Via Enterprise 2.0 Blog.

Although many companies aspire to promote easy interaction and coordination across departments, office locations, and pay scales, the “boundaryless” organization—like the paperless office—hasn’t materialized.

The corporate silo is alive and well.

This observation is supported in a recent working paper, “Communication (and Coordination?) in a Modern, Complex Organization,” written by Harvard Business School postdoctoral fellow Adam M. Kleinbaum, and professors Toby E. Stuart and Michael L. Tushman.

In an unnamed company with over 100,000 employees, the team analyzed over 100 million e-mails and 60 million electronic calendar entries over a three-month period. The results provide an unmatched look inside the “black box” that hides what Stuart calls the “soft wiring” of previously invisible social networks.

In this Q&A, Stuart says the team was taken aback by the lack of communication across the organization. In short, most people tended to communicate with others in their own group or with peers. Among the exceptions: women.

Read more at HBS Working Knowledge…

Traction® Software, the leading developer of Enterprise 2.0 social software, announced the release of Traction TeamPage 4.1 and new plug-ins for content ratings and user activity metrics. TeamPage 4.1 breaks new ground by making it easy to analyze user activity and rate TeamPage blog posts, comments or wiki pages to highlight and act on important information. These capabilities support “wiki gardeners” and help identify best practices or patterns that can build a stronger community and improve the content it creates.

“Ever since we made it possible for groups to communicate and collaborate by easily posting, editing and tagging pages, we’ve sought new ways to improve, enrich and leverage information in the course of doing everyday work,” said Greg Lloyd, president and CEO of Traction Software. “The new ratings and metrics plug-ins satisfy this goal by providing just the right mix of explicit ratings tools and implicit metrics tools to get the job done. They help the community gather quick and easy insight into what’s important now, and over all time.”

Traction TeamPage 4.1 Extends “Live Blog” Technology to Document Sharing

TeamPage 4.1 introduces a new document management interface so users can get a “live” view of what’s going on in a Document Share Folder, signaling in real-time as documents are added, removed, and checked-in or out. This new interface incorporates the same rapid AJAX technology used in Traction Software’s Live Blog micro-messaging plug-in, supporting twitter style micro-messaging that feels as interactive as live instant messaging.

New Content Rating Plug-in: 5-Star and Thumbs Up Rating Scales

With the new Ratings plug-in, workspace owners can enable one of two different rating methods. The 5-Star method enables you to highlight the average rating of ideas and product requirements. The “Thumbs up” (or “vote to promote”) method highlights the number of people who found a particular item to be interesting or useful.

Section panels on the Traction Front Page and in each workspace offer each person a permission filtered dashboard view of top rated content over the last 24 hours, 7 days or all time.

New Metrics Plug-In Tracks and Reports On User Activity, Exposes Best Practice

TeamPage’s new Metrics plug-in generates reports to allow members and managers to track and assess Traction workspace activity.

Users can now see what workspaces and which specific articles are read the most, and get their own view of top articles and comments by day, by week or over all time. For each article, the Metrics plug-in shows who read it and offers a link to the reader’s profile.

Metrics reports also offer deep insight into the collaborative process. While frequent authors are easy to spot, Metrics highlight key collaborators or “wiki gardeners,” who often work beneath the surface, improving content by editing, commenting and tagging. Reports also chart tags that are read or used the most, to help identify best practices and patterns that can be extended across workspaces.

Metrics and Ratings Plug-Ins Demonstrate Platform Extensibility

The new metrics and ratings capabilities are packaged as plug-ins, demonstrating the extensibility of the Traction platform. The plug-ins use the Traction SDK and SDL (Skin Definition Language), leveraging a pluggable database to store and query relational content including ratings and activity tracking.

In a Garner briefing in Stockholm last week, Mark Raskino, VP and Gartner fellow in the Emerging Trends group of Gartner Research, gave a talk about “Business, IT and the Recession”:

“CEOs need new ways to strengthen culture, values and trust as relationships of all kinds are stress-tested [...] Human decision makers made frail by the speed of the programmed & connected world.”

As a consequence of this business trust issue, Gartner sees real possibility of business taking the social web / Web 2.0 seriously.

Via The Content Economy.