Blogs

Enterprise 2.0 implementations are limiting our collaborative efforts. E2.0 has brought social and collaborative computing to organizations in an effort support knowledge work and innovation, but by not thinking beyond the software that resides in the box - customers are unknowingly limiting the value that the tools are able to provide.

Why?
An amazing pool of high quality data exists outside corporate walls.  This means that directly relevant data to your work efforts are nonexistent in our collaborative efforts. With nearly ubiquitous access to a wide range of information - why do we attempt to replicate this at full scale within our own walls and not get smarter about making use of what exists today?

The Approach

• To truly unleash the potential of enterprise collaborative tools we need to contextually inject external expertise directly into our collaborative processes.

The Foundation

• Commercial companies have long seen the potential of offering aggregation and trending capabilities that span various data sources. Yahoo Pipes provided an innovative visual way to aggregate and massage information from various web feeds.
• Tweetmeme has announced a new tool - DataSift - aimed at providing a service that can analyze vast amounts of Twitter data in real time.  Twitter's signal to noise ratio is immensely low – even when following colleagues or friends. It is by virtue of tooling to focus and contextualize the stream of information do we begin to get value.

The Value
Imagine a “smart system” capturing and cataloging articles that have been retweeted extensively that match the focal point of your collaborative efforts. A rated aggregation of this refined material, presented alongside your efforts would provide timely, state of art information that was previously dispersed and practically inaccessible.  Just as instant messaging presence provides a passive view into people’s availability, insights related to your knowledge work efforts can now stand within the same interface, supporting your work.

For any organization that collaborates around timely issues incorporation of this approach can only help efforts, potentially highlighting external expertise or trends that would go unnoticed otherwise.

Ultimately it is not specifically about DataSift or other sources, it is about not missing out on the world of valuable data that already exists around us, waiting for relevance.  It is time to take Enterprise 2.0 beyond the box that it ships in.