Word of the Day

Get ready for a new acronym (or is it a mnemonic?): SLATES. It’s used to describe the building blocks of Enterprise 2.0 applic­a­tions. The expanded, expensive report based on Tim O’Reilly’s What Is Web 2.0? essay intro­duces some new ideas around the subject (free excerpt here).

But what is SLATES?* According to Dion Hinchcliffe, it’s this:

SLATES describes the combined use of effective enter­prise search and dis­covery, using links to connect inform­a­tion together into a mean­ingful inform­a­tion eco­system using the model of the Web, providing low-​​barrier social tools for public author­ship of enter­prise content, tags to let users create emergent organ­iz­a­tional struc­ture, exten­sions to spon­tan­eously provide intel­li­gent content sug­ges­tions similar to Amazon’s recom­mend­a­tion system, and signals to let users know when enter­prise inform­a­tion they care about has been pub­lished or updated, such as when a cor­porate RSS feed of interest changes.

So it’s the kind of things that we’re used to from blogs, wikis, del.icio.us and flickr, applied to workers in a cor­porate envir­on­ment. These also fall under the umbrella term Network IT, IT that’s devoted to facil­it­ating col­lab­or­a­tion, allowing expres­sions of judge­ment and what Andrew McAfee calls fos­tering emer­gence — that is, allowing new inform­a­tion and work patterns to spon­tan­eously appear by making the tools available.

Ross Mayfield, whose wiki software SocialText plays a starring role in the just-​​released SuiteTwo package of enter­prise 2.0 tools, is sanguine about the impact of this on organisations:

Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, imme­di­ately recog­nize some­thing emerging. With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is sub­scribed to and the feedback from what they are pub­lishing — some­thing will emerge.

Sticks-​​in-​​the-​​mud may regard this emer­gence stuff as ‘chatter’ and wonder when this user is going to be doing old-​​fashioned stuff like getting on with her job. It’s a genuine concern and the need for small pilot pro­grammes and metrics for its ROI will be as neces­sary to any Enterprise 2.0 project as it is to any other change in the way busi­nesses work.

*In my view, ‘exten­sions’ is a bit redundant, but I guess SLATS wouldn’t sound nearly as good. ‘Links’ is a bit lame too, but there’s already some­thing called SATS.

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