It’s a sort of wiki — but wait, come back! There’s a few interesting differences from the sort of wiki software you might be used to:

(a) the whole thing is contained in a single HTML file — the javascript, the CSS, the data you’ve added.

(b) so you can download it and use it on your laptop or travel with it on a USB key. If you like you can sync that with an online version.

© you can use it on any browser — even the iPhone.

(d) it’s written to encourage short posts — Tiddlers — rather than the massive empty spaces found in the MediaWiki software and others.

Apparently, there’s some way to use it as a blog platform, but I’m still working that bit out…

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.

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.

I don’t think it is.

While many of the poster children of Web 2.0 are resolutely consumer — digg, youtube, myspace, wikipedia — their approach, and the 2.0 approach generally is about making things better for users, harnessing their input and aggregating them in clever ways. There’s nothing intrinsic to this agenda that segregates it from the business world. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Users are not just your customers, they are also you and your fellow employees. Practices, tools and technologies which make life better for users are good for everyone. The separation between consumer and business applications is, in some senses, artificial.

If RSS makes it easy for consumers to read their favourite publications, then it is just as easy for employees to pick up the latest company information anywhere, on any device without logging into the intranet. If AJAX allows for more compelling, smoother and more immediate results for website customers then the same might be true of your CRM database. If mash-ups allowing the combination of maps and house prices work well for consumers, then mash-ups that bring together information from sales, accounts and marketing databases into a centralised overview are equally good news for managers.

The Wisdom of Crowds approach, for example, is not one that would typically be associated with multinational businesses. However, as I’ve noted before, corporations are already waking up to the idea that decisions and information can be better with input from a wider range of sources than the board room. Google, Microsoft and Eli-Lilly already use prediction markets as internal decision-making tools. Prediction markets are a form of stock exchange in which members might bet on the best-selling products and other strategy decisions. The belief is that if the members of the decision-making pool are autonomous, have a variety of insights and are self-interested, then their collective decision-making power will be extremely successful.

Other companies such as First Direct, BT, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Mini and Nokia are using Wikis, real-time collaborative websites that can be generated and updated on-the-fly. Unlike intranets, they don’t require layers of permission and encourage employees to ‘chip-in’, correcting and expanding on other people’s knowledge. Built-in profile pages and complete documentation of all changes encourage the development of relationships between contributors and a sense of responsibility.

These are for used internal communication, to create a knowledge base or replace emails for important information. They’re also used for communications with customers, as a technical support or information tool that is co-created with users. Over 2000 organisations already use the SocialText paid-for Wiki service. Research firm Gartner predicts that Wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. In some companies, says SocialText, meeting times and email volume have already been cut by 50% through the use the collaborative tool.

Web 2.0 services such as CRM systems like salesforce.com or office applications like Google Spreadsheets have quite obvious business applications because they directly mimic tools that are already in use in the offline office. However, while switching to web equivalents can help cut costs, they truly become powerful to businesses with new approaches involving mobility, device agnosticism, openness, collaboration and real-time access to developing events and information.

Perhaps it’s the resistance to change that makes a new name, Enterprise 2.0, seem necessary. But perhaps what that really describes is the organisational change that needs to happen in order to get value out of any of these things, rather than the technologies themselves. For many businesses, I suspect, collaboration, lack of hierarchy, customer input and sharing are pretty foreign, scary concepts. In those cases, it’s not what sits on their computers that will be the big change.