Social Glass

I’d like to propose the following roadmap for deploying and Enterprise 2.0 solution within an organization:

1. Enterprise Search: Enable “Discovery” across legacy content repositories. The enterprise can realize the benefit of the investment it’s already made in content management and knowledge capture.
2. Social Collaboration: Deploy social collaboration tools to catalyze the generation of persisted tacit knowledge. Remove the barriers to content publishing and idea refinement.
3. Mashups: Create a set of widgets that sit on top of legacy systems and social collaboration tools. Provide an easy way to for non-technical users to create rich, dynamic applications (like QEDwiki or Yahoo Pipes).

In this way the traditional organization can implement SLATES (and social networking and mashups) in a staged manner and slowly adapt to social collaboration during the process.

Paula Thornton wrote a very interesting post yesterday about how Enterprise 2.0 helps us define connections between a human and the footprint they leave behind on the intranet. Before the notion of Enterprise 2.0 this was not possible as she writes:

Surprisingly, within corporations I can ‘find’ anyone by name, but their name tells me very little about them. Reading what they have to say and/or seeing what their deliverables are (even just the metadata about them) is revealing. All of this reinforces the concepts of emergent: it’s the sweet spot between chaos and order…

This got me thinking about a post my boss wrote about information management where he discusses a Master Data Management scenario where the enterprise attempts to define a human entity by pulling in metadata from disparate sources (it took me a while to understand the scenario as I’m not a data guy by the way, but once I got it it made a lot of sense). This is an area that Enterprise 2.0 overlooks. Most corporations have a lot of information about their employees already (without Enterprise 2.0), but the problem is it’s scattered. And this is where data management plays a key role.

Imagine a scenario where we not only deployed an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem (knowledge market, blogs, wikis, social bookmarking, social networking, enterprise search etc.) but also implemented a data management strategy to harvest the metadata about all human entities within the organization from all of the legacy, “1.0″ systems. We could then define a single and discoverable master identify for a person and enrich the social discovery process significantly. We might define a relationship between the human entity and any of the following legacy assets:

• project deliverables (word documents)
• project plans
• white papers
• resume
• skill set (Java, C#, SQL etc - most HR systems store this info)
• position in the corporate hierarchy

This approach makes sense for the enterprise because it leverages the legacy investment it spent years patching and upgrading. It makes sense for knowledge workers because we can link them to their legacy footprint (so they get credit for work they’ve already done) and to the emergent data we get out of Enterprise 2.0.

Defining the human entity in this way needs to be an integral part of any Enterprise 2.0 rollout.