Social software in knowledge-intense organisations
August 31st, 2007 by Jiri
Just before my holidays, I took time to catch up on podcasts and videos, which is something I have not managed to do since my commuting dramatcially decreased earlier this year. One of the most interesting ones was Jon Udell’s interview with Lewis Shephard on the use of social software in US intelligence community.
Shephard paints a fascinating picture of how social software facilitated the fundamental cultural and operational transformation that the intel community went through after 11th September 2001.
Podcast also outlines which social software technologies are useful in a knowledge-intense corporate settings (and does so more eloquently than Andrew McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 blog). They use the following technologies:
- wiki - knowledge base
- blogs - capturing individual & collective expertise
- rss - providing information feeds
- tagging & bookmark sharing
It would be really interesting to hear a bit more about how other companies that pioneered the use of social software (MS, Sun, or DKW) to see how are the things going. According to this report from IBM press conference, two years ago Big Blue had 20,000 internal weblogs. How many of them do they have now? What is the percentage of dead blogs? What are the patterns of successful usage?
Weblogs (& wikis) have been around for long enough for us to move beyond the experimentation stage and to come up with strategies on using them to make a real business impact.
Interesting you highlight IBM with some data but don’t list us as a pioneer. There is much more to social software then blogs. Last month I number was around 75K which has been steadily growing since internal blogs were incorporated around 2002. All IBM employee’s are allowed to have internal blogs. Many also have external blogs.
List of IBM Blogs - http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/
List of developerWorks blogs - http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/blogs/
Social software has been so successful at IBM, we have pioneered the first suit of social software offerings called Lotus Connections.
[…] the subjects I am really into is social software and its use for business purpose. Last August, I wished “to hear a bit more about how other companies that pioneered the use of social software […]