Euan Semple came along to the recent London Wiki Wednesday. He related some of his experiences about starting social media at the BBC. They started with an internal bulletin board, which has been used by over 18,500 of their 24,000 employees. Then they created their own social networking tool called Connect, which helps them track down specific expertise in their organisation, and form interest groups for particular projects. After that they started using blogging tools for internal communication. There are currently over 130 in the organisation, one of which is regularly read by over 4,000 employees. They have also implemented use of wikis as well. Around 500 people have access to them in a controlled way to do things like creating procedural documentation, or for project collaboration. He talked about how they got 89 bloggers to collaborate to produce a corporate blogging policy. There are now around 3,000 wikis in use. Euan favours separate tools, loosely joined rather than trying to tackle the problem with one corporate combined approach.
In this post over on his blog The Obvious, he went a little further with a post titled “The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?“. His argument is that it’s going to happen in your organisation anyway, so don’t:
DO NOTHING
but:
GET OUT OF THE WAY
and:
KEEP THE ENERGY LEVELS UP
In the comments John Husband of Wirearchy thought it was the enterprise social computing manifesto for today. Tim O’Reilly (of web 2.0 fame) seems to like it too and says “right on“. But over on ZDNet, fellow Social Media Collective and Enterprise Irregular member Dion Hinchcliffe puts together a thoughtful post. He worries, quite rightly, that the “do nothing” approach in the Enterprise is going to cause problems. He issues a rallying call to corporate IT:
“So this is the call to action to IT departments where they can actually do the most good and use their top-down influence to find ways to embrace Web 2.0 by eliminating the intrinsic barriers to it without compromising the integrity of enterprise systems or our businesses. Enterprise software architects, CTOs, and CIOs must start thinking about this, or they will have to become the policemen to stop the movement en masse to outsourced systems, SaaS, mashups, and other self-service on-demand applications that meets users needs.”
Dion’s post is well worth a read, and finishes on his 10 predictions for E2.0 in 2007.
In the inbox this morning Business Week Online led me to their latest CEO Guide to Technology - another resource on wikis, which contains some good short articles and material.
Lastly, don’t forget the next London Wiki Wednesday on 4 April. We’ve got 20 people booked on it so far, and it’s being held “in the swimming pool” at Microsoft’s Soho, Central London office. Swimming pool? Apparently you’ll have to come along to understand.
Update 1: Euan, quite rightly, pulled me up on the way I’d mis-represented his post, so I’ve added ”don’t” and “but” to clarify the three options, and his recommendation (which clearly worked so well at the BBC).
Update 2: When you follow the link to Euan’s post, make sure you read the great conversation in the comments and follow the trail further.
