Social Glass

We’re starting to see good corporate interest in the next generation of the intranet. There’s no doubt executives have been exposed to articles such as this Gartner Report which highlights Web 2.0 as adding significant value to the corporate intranet over the next few years, or this Business Week article entitled Web 2.0 has Corporate America Spinning (enough said).

To me the value proposition Enterprise 2.0 brings to the table is obvious, a no-brainer. And, in my experience, a well thought out presentation certainly sparks the interest of the aforementioned corporate executive.

But, it seems that most companies that recognise a need to “upgrade” their intranet are skiddish when it comes to implementing a full-blown SLATES solution. These companies, instead, have identified a glaring hole in their ability to discover content and are interested initially in the first “S” in SLATES, Search (or Enterprise Search).

We must not forget all of those, shall I say, Enterprise 1.0 applications that are still necessary and add value to the enterprise. Companies still need to be able to invoice their customers, process payments, store customer account details, manage the sales process, provision services and view reports on the state of said transactional processes. Enterprise Search compliments these systems making information from them AND knowledge stored on the intranet searchable. Google, for example, has a tremendous Enterprise Search offering, and we’ve seen it add value quickly for a lot of clients.

The lesson learned here is, while the Enteprise 2.0 utopia mandates the deployment and adoption of a SLATES-oriented solution, we must not forget how far off many companies are from realizing the comprehensive value proposition of Enterprise 2.0. Search allows companies to quickly harness information from assets they’ve already invested in and does little in the way of changing the work habits their employees have developed over the years (i.e. Search indexes MS Word documents so others can find them, so knowledge workers can continue using MS Word).

After Search has been implemented and the chaos of the “legacy” corporate intranet has been contained we’ll find companies to be more receptive to the remaining LATES in “SLATES”.