Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Enterprise 2.0, SoA and the Freeform Advantage
"This is why enterprise systems have low adoption rates, little user generated content, high quality metadata and email is used for everything. Every sacrifice made for sake of control reduces network effects, assumes a static environment you can design against and is designed by supposed experts outside the context of use. Contrary to the most disruptive pattern of social software -- sharing control creates value."
from my friend ross mayfield, ceo of socialtext, one of a growing breed of startup ceo as industry evangelist (dave sifry of technorati is another good example) comes this great post on the challenge of introducing dynamic emerging tools into traditional enterprise environments...
one of the hardest things to broker inside an organization is freeformed communication and collaboration - it just doesn't seem to come naturally, and most enterprise class applications tend to be very structured and ultimately to cumbersome to foster volunteered usage...
this post from ross and the post from andrew that ross referenced resonated w/ me - not only did i attend both the syndicate & soa conferences last week on the same days as well as in the same hotel (conveniently) but i was recently interviewed by infoworld (bob lewis - nice guy w/ a great perspective) - the focus was on continuing education, but i had a slightly different take on it - i believe that both individuals and their organizations have an opportunity to learn and garner knowledge sharing daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly, by project, by program, by initiative, etc... and that some very easy to implement and use, straight forward tools available inexpensively and currently in use outside the enterprise could provide a lot of value - namely: blogging, rss, video and audio podcasting - in general the social media toolkit...
obviously ross and andrew feel similarly :)
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