Mixed by Gregory Culpin (Knowledge Officer @ Whatever) in Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise search, Knowledge mgmt
November
An article originally posted on www.socialglass.com
“Recent discussions at work have prompted me to re-iterate something very fundamental that often gets overlooked when it comes to Enterprise 2.0. An organization will never adopt a single social productivity tool. Knowledge will ALWAYS be scattered.
Enterprise search will unlock data and increase the propensity for information (and the knowledge workers who create it) to be discovered. Discoverability leads to recognition, and recognition leads to increased participation. Enterprise 2.0 must be approached holistically.
Clearspace doesn’t do this. Thoughtfarmer doesn’t do this. Mindtouch doesn’t do this. There is no “Enterprise 2.0 in a box” solution. Period.”
Read the full article at www.socialglass.com
In my opinion…
I recently stumbled upon Jeremy Thomas who stated a few months back on Twitter that “Data within the enterprise will never be unified in one place i.e. a wiki, community, KM platform” and that “Search is key”. This followed his post on Social Glass which had been followed up by people such as Jon Husband and Chris McGrath with whom I couldn’t agree more on the fact “Enterprise 2.0 is as much a mindset than tools”. However, I guess you realize that closing the door to new potential solutions actually opens a huge one for being challenged? 
Search is of course important, but in its current state search alone is insufficient. Enterprise search is as broken as web search: too many different sources, too little context. The fact is although it brings silos together, unfortunately context is either left behind or difficult to homogenize when brought in from this diversity of sources and formats.
The only option left is to then give users the ability to build context themselves around all this information once it’s been discovered and/or retrieved.
Funnily enough Jon Husband mentioned PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) which we’ve believed for a long time to be an essential step towards proper adoption of EKM (Enterprise Knowledge Management) solutions.
“Personally essential, collectively critical” : these are actually thoughts which lead our team to develop a few months back what is being recognized as a very elegant I&KM receipe which gathers any form of information (docs, websites, emails, contacts, search tools), but which more importantly allows users to interact around these items. Not only is all your information searchable, but it becomes contextualised under a single coherent umbrella: “No more silos, just context”. Social interaction and productivity then kick in to give you (what we think is) an all-in-one enterprise-wide solution for EKM.
Either way, I’d be more than glad to share thoughts on this with you guys. We are getting very positive feedback about the platform, but it’s definitely a treat to get dubious people on board and convince them this is actually possible;-)
Your comments
November 7, 2008 by Daniel Tunkelang #885
In general, enterprises often expect technologies to solve problem–and I suppose vendors may be complicit in setting those expectations. I find this to be particularly true for enterprise search. I’ve blogged about this a bunch at The Noisy Channel, e.g., http://thenoisychannel.com/2008/04/12/can-search-be-a-utility/
November 12, 2008 by ashwaria #900
Thats good