There are a number of us who have a passion for realizing the potential of knowledge- in all forms. Those of us here at BrainKeeper have made the gathering, categorizing, and serving of information via the internet our career for many years. So, we are very interested and excited as to where some of the more modern software conventions are taking us. We are most interested in concepts such as:
- Social collaboration software (such as WIKIs) applied to the corporate environment
- Software as a Service and its increased adoption- Web 2.0 as is relates to a dynamic, rich user experience
- The maturation of information delivery methods, such as RSS, ATOM, and BLOGGING
We'll take a look at the first topic here, and address others in future posts.
A good number of us have witnessed several trends developing in the area of online communication. Sites such as MySpace and LinkedIn have proven the value (or at least the interest) of personal online collaboration, and similar initiatives are constantly in the works to capture a part of this 'social networking' concept.
Why is it, then, that the tools developed for communication within the corprate sector have not been heralded or adopted with nearly the zeal that these 'personal' sites have? Where this has even been recognized as a valuable initiative, companies are turning to homegrown knowledge bases and open source WIKI products to solve issues of intra-corporate knowledge transfer, maintenance and retention. These solutions have the potential to address the needs for which they were created, but most implementations end up being nothing more than a check box in the to-do list of a CIO, or they sit dormant after a lackluster kickoff- or the saddest situation: they are only used by a fraction of the employees and the potential is never realized.
There are some more structured, fee-based solutions available- with more being developed, that hope to capitalize on this opportunity. While some are close, we have not yet seen a system that is simple enough for the majority, while having the full set of features needed to address the challenges that face companies who need online, distributed, interactive collaboration. I doubt we will see a 'MyCompanySpace' site anytime soon, but whoever can provide a complete solution will have quite a breakthrough.
