Beneath the Surface

I did an inter­view with Stewart Manley, CTO of Mediasurface, yes­terday. The company makes Content Management software for pro­du­cing business websites, whether they be internet, intranet or extranet sites. Their cus­tomers tend to be quite heavy­weight, such as the Environment Agency, NATO, Oxford University Press, and SSA Global. A far cry, in other words, from the typical Web 2.0 suspects.

We were talking about the ways in which elements found on consumer sites, such as flickr, are pen­et­rating the business envir­on­ment and changing organ­isa­tions’ expect­a­tions of how the software should behave and the activ­ities it should facilitate.

One inter­esting example is ‘folk­sonomy’. Our software has had the ability to add keywords and other meta-​​tags for years. But in a lot of cases these remained unused. Now we’re seeing con­sid­er­ably more interest. It’s my belief that people have gone out and used sites like flickr and exper­i­enced first hand the use­ful­ness of tagging and the ver­sat­ility it can bring to inform­a­tion man­age­ment. They then bring that back into the work­place and have an expect­a­tion that they will tag items and that others will too.

But the change goes way deeper than that:

There seems to have been an increase in cor­porate agility. If you take a step back in time, com­panies used to talk about Knowledge Management, and they’d hire a Knowledge Manager. They did it in a top-​​down way. Now, there’s far more aware­ness that the creation of know­ledge requires col­lab­or­a­tion. Our focus in creating applic­a­tions has become much more about enabling people to work together in shared spaces.

So people are asking for wikis and blogs? I suggest.

It’s ironic. Wikis and blogs tend to be viewed with sus­pi­cion by senior managers. They sound far too trendy and up-​​to-​​date. A lot of the cor­por­ates we deal with are still deciding whether to upgrade from Windows 98 to XP, so anything invented in the current decade is going to raise eyebrows.

At the same time, though, there is this trend to having more and more people within a business con­trib­uting to web applic­a­tions. We may not call them wikis, but that’s what they are, effect­ively. There’s a lot more accept­ance that people from across an organ­isa­tion can con­tribute useful know­ledge on a subject, even if that’s not their official area of expertise.

I’ve expressed some sus­pi­cion of the term Enterprise 2.0 before, and in some respects, what Stewart said endorsed that scep­ti­cism. Corporates are not likely to be hotbeds of revolu­tionary change. On the other hand, there’s a lot more going on in terms of atti­tu­dinal changes and approaches than even the managers of those organ­isa­tions are aware of. It seems that so long as we don’t mention the dreaded ‘2.0′, things will move along just fine.

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• Enterprise Too, not 2.0
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