If you have not had the chance to read some of the information to come out of Gartner's recent Symposium/ITxpo, it's definitely worth the read (here, for example). This, along with some other recent blogosphere posts by Nick Carr, Michael Platt (also here) and Dion Hinchcliffe as well as a recent article in the MITSloan Management Review here by Andrew McAfee have begun to take the discussion of what Web 2.0 technologies can do for an enterprise to the next level. While a rehasing of everything presented in these posts and articles is outside the scope of this post, they are all well thought out and make some very good points related to the next generation of Enterprise software. (By the way, not only are the posts themselves very good, but the comments are a must read as well).
User Adoption
One point of debate seems to center around the fact that the vast majority of workers are not content producers. They don't contribute to blogs, they don't maintain pages or sections of a wiki and they don't contribute to social tagging paradigms, thus training them to use internal blog or wiki software would be pointless as the adoption rate would be terrible.
What if these "new" tools (wikis, blogs, social tagging, etc.) were not used to primarily share knowledge? What if, instead, they were used by a workgroup/department/company primarily to work more efficiently? Then the knowledge capture would end up being a side effect of the work process. (A hugely beneficial side effect). These tools cannot be measured with the same yardstick that "consumer" wikis and blogs are measured with, since they are going to be used for different purposes (sometimes very different, sometimes slightly different). Instead, if these tools are going to succeed in a corporate environment, they must be looked at not only based on how the company can benefit from them, but also based on how individuals can benefit.
For example, if a software development department uses a wiki to produce and publicize documentation, who benefits more? Individual developers or the company as a whole? (Assuming the wiki is set up and maintained "properly")
The developer gets a living, breathing set of documentation that makes it easier to know what's going on within the application under development. This has to cut down on development time. Additionally, since the entire development team is maintaining this documentation in one "place", communication about changes ends up being automated by the nature of viewing recent changes in the wiki.
The company, as a whole, gets several benefits out of this as well. Increased productivity from its employees and the open sharing of "knowledge" about the application being developed (just to name a couple).
In the end, the combination of all of these benefits together is not something that is easily measured. However, you cannot deny that they are there, ready to be taken advantage of. The issue will not be if these tools are adopted, it will be how they are adopted and how great a benefit comes out of implementing them.
