coComment.com

My last to do for this week’s workshop is to contribute reasonable tools for our Web 2.0 community. As the most famous tools were already described and my colleagues created groups to participate, I decided to learn about cocomment.com.

I have never heard before of cocomment but what I have figured out today was quite interesting. With Cocoment it is possible to share conversations and to be informed about every update/comment on a blog which a member of a community creates.
I have created my first group named Enterprise 2.0 and I hope many of my colleagues will participate to figure out how it works. In case of any questions please leave me a comment.

Introduction of Web 2.0 tools

For all my friends and recent colleagues which do not know exactly how Web 2.0 works, here is a great and funny introduction (copied from our last workshop instruction )

Blogging within organisations – advantages and pitfalls

In our last lecture we discussed the topics blogging and microblogging in an Enterprise as well as the internal and external benefits. In this post I am going to provide examples of companies using blogging and investigate the advantages and drawbacks of organisational blogging.
A general discussion if blogging is a waste of time or a corporate tool is provided by a great article in www.personneltoday.com.
According to the article in the beginning of blogging several cases happened where employees wrote not in a correct manner about their company and were fired. But instead of forbidden blogging (emloyees could blog in their spare time as well) and dismissing employees it is more advisable to encourage employees to blog under company guidelines. IBM for example is one of the most famous companies that allows blogging by following the IBM guidelines, which can be found in the mentioned article as well.

Here are some examples of companies or employees who share their thoughts in blogs:

- Blogs of Microsoft employees

- Windows Mobile Blog

- another blog of a Microsoft employee

- Dr. Pepper

- A case study of Dresdner Kleinwort

- Dell

- Mc Donalds

- Boeing

So what are the concrete benefits of blogging?

- Empowering and motivation for employees

- Organisations can not afford not to allow blogging.

- Enhanced collaboration internally and with clients.

- Increased work efficiency and avoidance of e-mail overload.

- Enhanced employee participation

- Improved recruitment

- Inexpensive marketing

But what are the pitfalls of blogging within organisatiosn (internally or externally):

- Employees spending too much time blogging in their employer’s time

- Employees are stepping over borders

- Companies can use blogs as the only way to answer customer requests (seems to be impersonal, especially for unexperienced customers). E.g. Microsoft has a comprehensive blog to infom customer about any aspects of their products. But when open questions remain, there is hardly a way to speak directly to a Microsoft supporter. From the company’s point of view this saves ressources and money as customer requests are linked directly to blogs where an answer can be found.

A good discussion of the benefits and pitfalls is given in Smoothspan Blog. Companies can try to ban Web 2.0 tooly by Firewall from workplaces but there is hardly no control of private computers. If the management wants the best employees staying, the power of using Web 2.0 is a great opportunity to empower people.

On the other hand there is a lot of IT fear especially about trade secrets. Employees might write in their blogs about top secret issues. It is a hard fact in the global economy that some companies are innovators and other try to copy them.
Every organisation must be assessed individually in regards to reliability, security, governance, compliance, and privacy to implement Web 2.0 in the right manner. Why not trying it with company policies and usage guidelines?

My passions of Web 2.0

The last task of the current workshop is to write the aspects of Web 2.0 I feel most passionate about. There are two points of views I would like to describe:

1. My personal passion as a private person
2. My business passion as an employee of a company

1. My personal passion as a private person:
My first contact with Web 2.0 was several years ago when a big hype started and everybody in my country created an account on “Lokalisten”, a social network in Germany. Only a couple of weeks later I had an account at “Xing” too and discovered the business side of networking. All of my colleagues have an acoount at Xing and it provides the great oportunity to stay in contact when somebody leaves the company. Until today social networking is one of the Web 2.0 ideas I like best.

When Facebook started to put effort in the German market it tooks only weeks until most of my friends and colleagues created a facebook account in addition to their “lokalisten” account. So “Lokalisten” was more about communicating with your closed local friends and Facebook became the tool for international networking. Before I moved to Australia many friends gave me contact details of Australian friends by giving me their facebook username.

Today I am often surprised about the opportunities Web 2.0 tools provide to stay in contact with your friends at home. I can share thoughts, pictures and experiences and normally somebody answers withing a short time. In addition I created my second blog after my first experiences with this blog to share my overseas experiences.

From a private point of view I would like to mention one more tool that has become essential for me (and for my studies as well) and it is Wikipedia. I learned during my lessons how Wikipedia exactly works and I am often excited about the good quality of Wikipedia entries.

So my private passion of Web 2.0 is networking and knowledge sharing!

2. My business passion as an employee of a company

In one of my prior posts I wrote about my fist experiences with Enterprise 2.0. I wrote that the company I used to work for the last three years does not use Web 2.0 technologies. Now I learned more about what Web 2.0 is and I discovered that I was wrong. This company uses Web 2.0 technlogies such as Sharepoint, Wikis, shares vidoes on Youtube and so on. But I hardly see any Enterprise 2.0 strategy to bring all of these tools together.

As I mentioned in my first point of my Web 2.0 passions, nearly all my recent colleagues have a Xing account, a Facebook account and a network. This network is not part of the internal communication strategy but is used often instead of emails. So the social network is a typical example of an Enterprise 2.0 tool built up by employees.

The missing strategy means in addition, that FLATNESSES principles (please find here a good description of one of my student colleagues) are not considered. And that is where my passion from a business point of view is. My favourite idea is openess and network oriented.

I found out that often in organisations critical issues have an “official view”, the top bottom communication and an “inofficial view”, the information available from your colleagues. That has the following consequences (I only mention the most important ones):
- Lack in motivation as most of the employees feel cheated
- Information redundancy as the sources of information are not always clear
- Incorrect decisions of superiors as they do not have the experience and knowledge to decide all important decisions alone and by themselves. But they are not able to contribute with professionals with more experiences due to “company secret policies”.

If you made similar or opposite experiences, please write me a comment or send me a trackback.

Web 2.0 Business Improvement Proposal

I am looking forward to assessment item 2 as we can write a business improvement proposal in a group assignment.
I would prefer to write the proposal for a real Australian company instead to the entrepreneurial idea but currently I have neither a group nor do I know any company to write the proposal for.

I would like to work in a group with at least one or two people with technical background as I come from a business background and can provide many experience especially in B2B online business.

If any student of INN 346 is interested to form a group or has a company to contribute with please write me a comment.

My experience about blogging

A couple of weeks ago I created my first blog and started to write posts, mainly about the topic Enterprise 2.0 and related issues. After the first doubts of what to write and how to write it I looked for other interesting information online available (such as other blogs), shared these information on my own blog and provided my own thoughts.

Our lecturer Jason helped us to start blogging by giving us online sources and best practice examples of companies using Enterprise 2.0 principles. Further instructions we got of well structured practicals where we were required to write about special topics.

Unfortunately I started the unit Enterprise 2.0 two weeks after the beginning, so I missed the initial instructions and had to do more workshop tasks at the same time. Furthermore as an international studend I discovered that some Web 2.0 tools are different to European tools. I used to be active on some European tools such as Xing (a platform with the same business idea as linkedIn), so I created new accounts on LinkedIn and try now to build up a new network with the Enterprise 2.0 community.
Our lecturer Jason instructed us to create a Twitter account as well. I created one and had a look if some of my old colleagues in Europe are using Twitter but I couldn’t find any. I was not sure how to follow the Enterprise 2.0 community on Twitter so I decided to create a Google Reader account as it provides great possibilities to read all new blog posts of my university colleagues as well as it allows me to comment new posts. So I am wondering about the big deal of Twitter but I would like to discuss this in another post.

My first experiences in blogging are that it is a lot of work as some preparations are necessary and some research has to be done before the actual writing can start. During the writing I tried to link to all information I found to give evidence to my thoughts and to share information as one of the main goals of blogging is to share knowledge (especially for Enterprises 2.0). Our lecturer told us to spend more than ten hours weekly with our blog and I am quite sure that this time is necessary to build up a good blog and network with interesting input.
To tell the truth, in the beginning of blogging I invested less time as the preparations of the other units at university takes a lot of time, too. But I realised that spending more time with my blog improves the quality and I have more fun in writing posts and sharing information.

I would like to assess the intermediate result of my blog and my online network. After initial difficulties as described above I am trying to provide regular posts and I progress well. Before I started blogging Web 2.0 was for me a strange word and I really did not know what exactly it means. Now I learned a lot about these tools and I am using them regularly.

According to the first task of our current practical I would like to discuss the following points more in depth:

1. Practical ability to leverage off web 2.0 technologies to enhance personal branding: For a good personal branding networking is the most important point. So I created a www.google.com/reader account to follow the blogs of the Enterprise 2.0 community. So I can see which blogs have been updated recently and then I can leave comments there. Leaving comments in other blogs is the best way to receive comments as other bloggers are aware of your blog. Due to this proceeding I was able to receive some comments, too.

2. Manner and consistency of participation in weekly workshops activities and contribution: I have published blogs to all workshop topics since I started with this unit. In addition I commented the blogs of other students and sent trackbacks to other blogs when meaningful. I used other blogs and online sources to give evidence of my posts.

3. Ability to appraise Web 2.0 strategies and solutions for organisational and personal success: I could make a good progress in this point and I have already recommended the company where I used to work many imprvement ideas. I am lookig forward to assessment item 2 where we can write a business improvement proposal and I hope to find a group with a real Australian company to work for.

4. Ability to engage successfully with the wider community (including people outside of QUT) using Web 2.0 tools and techniques: This is one of the most difficult point but I sentsome trackback to the wider community and my blog was linked from outside.

In my next post I am going to write about how to fulfill assessment item 2. If you have any recommendations mainly about how to improve networking, please feel free to write comments or send me a trackback.

Examples of companies using Enterprise 2.0 (4/4)

Graymont Limited, one of North America’s largest producer’s of lime, wanted to connect all employees as they were “just around the corner” and turned to Enterprise 2.0 technologies. They believed that sharing information can help them doing a better job and being more cost-productive. So every employee should be part of the collaborative environment, even if they come in “steel-toed boots” and only occasionally sit on a computer.
The idea was to build up a company intranet (not Microsoft’s Sharepoint) and that the employees are responsible by themselves for keeping own listings up to date.

Not only the information of employee’s is avalable on intranet, the company document management system with thousands of items is published, too.

Ogilvy, one of the chairmen was asked for the payback. “Easier access to information and tools will make employees more productive – and less frustrated – and also reduce the management burden for IT. But the big values, will come in areas outside IT – when a person in Pennsylvania, say, connects with someone in Alberta and shows him something he’s done that saves the company $10,000 or $20,000; or when an informal discussion group is established amongst maintenance workers or operators across borders and geography. We expect those things will happen regularly.” In addition, myGraymont helps to build up new relationships.

How does myGraymont suits to the SLATES criteria:

Flatness

Search: my Graymont provides a lot of information that can be found in the new intranet

Links: The information are linked and connected

Authorig: The employees are responsible by themsyelves for the information

Tags: I could not find any information about tags

Extensions: Same as with tags but I am sure the chosed technology provide extensions as well.

Signals: The same as with tags and extensions.

Are the additional criteria of Hinchcliffe fulfilled as well?

Freeform: Every employeeis responsible for it’s documents and there is no approval for publishing.

Social: The provided information in the intranet are social and transparent as every employee is able to change and to share it

Network oriented: The intranet allows to build up relationships

Emergence: This was the goal of installing the new intranet to bring people from different part of the world together and share their information.

From my point of view the Graymont Intranet 2.0 is a great example of the Enterprise 2.0 hype of medium sized companies. The most important thing is to adjust the competitive disadvantage to large companies mainly in the knowledge area by bringing the whole company knowledge together to one platform.

The idea works as stated by the chairman Ogilvy: “When a person in Pennsylvania, say, connects with someone in Alberta and shows him something he’s done that saves the company $10,000 or $20,000.”

Examples of companies using Enterprise 2.0 (3/4)

This is the follow up post of “Examples of companies using Enterprise 2.0 – (1/4)“, where I repeated the princeples of Enterprise 2.0 and gave examples of companies using these priciples. In this post I am going to examine these companies more in depth.

The first Enterprise 2.0 example I would like to determine is the Oracle Technology Network. (OTN) is the world’s largest community of developers, database administrators, and technical architects. It cointains Freeware downloads of all Oracle’s infrastructure software, technical articles, discussion forums, podcasts and blogs.

The SLATES principles “Search, Links, …” are all fulfilled as it is possible to find relevant information, it is linked to other information and many authors write for Oracle (eg Oracle blogs). Tags, extensions and signals are for sure available as well, even when I do not want determine further these three principles.

The OTN is open, as it provides software download for free, so the software is available too for competitors. All information of OTN is shared as it is available for everybody, it fulfills transparency and peering as well as acting globally as the software is available around the world and developers and designers are working around the worls on this project.

Golden rules for corporate blogging

I recently started blogging with the mission to build up an online presence to get practice by using web 2.0 technologies by myself. I created my blog just a couple of weeks ago and now I am asking how can I improve it and found the following golden rules for blogging.

I will try to follow these guidelines of the Marketing and Innovation blog at the internet, which gives a comprehensive overview about the do’s and don’ts. The most important aspects we need for our unit are covered, and in addition you can find much more useful input.

Examples of companies using Enterprise 2.0 (2/4)

One of our workshop tasks for this week is to find at least three companies working with Enterprise 2.0 principles and technologies. We are to compare the principles of our examples with the SLATES model of McAffee and the additional aspects of Hinchcliffe I described in my post Getting started with Enterprise 2.0.

In my last post I described the use of E2.0 principles by the SYNAXXON AG. Further best case studies are determined by Robb Cross, an associated professor at the University of Virginia’s McIntire School of Commerce. His recent field of research has focused on applying social network analysis ideas to critical business issues. He has worked with over 200 leading organizations (companies, government agencies, and non-profit organizations) on a variety of solutions. On his web side Robb Cross provides a selection of case studies.

Socialtext is a collaboration platform which allows organizations of all sizes to collaborate faster, decide faster and change faster. They publish a list of case studies on their web side.

Another good collection of companies using E2.0 is provided by another student of the Enterprise 2.0 unit

Sam Parson gives in his blog interesting insights about 2.0 strategies of the Shell company.

Jeffrey Idear shows in his blog how Accenture uses Web 2.0 strategies.

In my next post I am going to select three examples of the case studies provided above and determine which FLATNESSES principles are fulfilled.

As a conclusion please find here some interesting articles regarding Enterprise 2.0 in the CIO magazine:

1. CIO Magazine:
The article starts with a genral introduction about Enterprise 2.0, describes the risks and benefits, how to get started and how to find the right vendor in this area.

2. Mc Kinsey survey, how buinesses are using Web 2.0 (Unfortunately not free)

3. Five innovations CIO’s shouldn’t miss