Reiser 2.0

Web 2.0 applied in an Enterprise – a huge business opportunity

Web 2.0 is a user centric phenomena . People can express themselves through blogs, videos, podcast etc. The community decides what is hot through rating,voting, references etc. At a recent presentation in Zurich I created the theme Web 2.0 : Exhibitionism and Mashup of the individual to summarize Web2.0.
BTW- the theme for Web 1.0 was : Have lunch or be lunch Thanks to Scott ..)

But what are the opportunities of Web 2.0 for an enterprise ?

How can a company take advantage of the social dynamics of Web 2.0 and turn it into a business value and business advantage ?

Every organization has a formal and informal structure. Usually an enterprise is focusing on the formal structures and processes and is not a able (or interested) to leverage the power of the informal structure. It is common knowledge that formal structure and processes are important to drive a business and business decisions but an important part of the decision making process is based on the informal information .

What if we could build a system were we could capture the formal and informal information and do a simple and dynamic Mashup service based on an enterprise search ?

This would open completely new ways on how an enterprise could implement a Social Capital based knowledge, skills and people resourcing system.

Use Case

Let's look at a generic use case:

Every employee has an easy and secure way to contribute his content (knowledge) within an enterprise. Anybody can easily find information and related information are automatically combined (mashup) with the corresponding data from the respective business processes . As more an employee participates (contribute,vote,reuse) , as more Social Value she/he can earn from the community. This Social Value is integrated in the enterprise compensation and career planning process and the employee is recognized and compensated when they actively participate.

Wouldn't this be great?

• An Enterprise could answer the WIIFM (What is in it for me) question for each employee
  -> Employees see the benefits and rewards for active participation

• The system would be a self driven Social Capital System based on community generated Social Values

  • Search results are influenced by the associated social value hence valuable information would bubble up
    -> I find the most valuable information quickly

  • Searching for people with a certain skills can be part of a standard search result
    -> Answer to: I need an IdM expert for a financial customer tomorrow in Boston

  • Self specified skills of a person are automatically validated by the community (similar to LinkedIn recommendation model)
    -> Wow - no skills assessment survey anymore, we have dynamic skills inventory in real time

  • Mashup of business data and community knowledge
    -> Show me all products/services/solutions I can propose to my customer based on a mashup of community knowledge and CRM data

  • Build a community based trust model
    ->Would you buy something from a seller in eBay with a bad feedback score
    (BTW, we might want to include the eBay seller feedback in our social value calculation model (Paul?) )

Web n+1: Participate or loose

How can you implement such a vision?

As part of our Customer Engineering CE2.0 project we are designing such a system with the theme Web n+1.
see here why we choose the Web n+1 theme

Enclosed are some initial lesson learned based on the  CE2.0 project
(Sun folks can go to the CE2.0 project page)

1) Social Capital Community Design

Define a Social Capital Value system for people/content and communities

-> At Sun we created a mathematical model called IC/Reuse metrics to measured the reuse of Intellectual Capital (Content)
To build a Social Value system we currently extending the IC/Reuse model to include People and Communities
see  (Knowledge Management meets Web 2.0)

2) Learn about Folksonomies to figure out how to add a social value measurement system into it

3) Learn about Semantic Web

Semantic Web allows to create machine readable relationships between the semantic of a word and the context.
Also it helps build a flexible data/relationship model between people/community and content
(check out Henry Story's blog )

4) Technology

Lower the barrier for participation by implementing a secure & ease-of-use technology infrastructure for the users

• Enterprise-wide Security and IdM (Identity Management) infrastructure (BTW, Sun is the technology leader in IdM)
  

• Services based architecture

  • Build (simple) re-usable services

• Consistent and interactive user experience

  • AJAX based web widgets architecture

• (Semantic) Tagging

  • Autotagging while content is loaded

  • Strong tag recommendation

  • integration of Enterprise Thesaurus (interface between business process and informal communities)

  • folksonomy support

  • Semantic Web support

• Integrated Search

  • Search as a service

  • dynamic content and (semantic) meta data mashup

  • search results with dynamic community define taxonomies and folksonomies

Technorati Tags: web2.0 web_n+1 web3.0 CE2.0

Posted at 11:42PM Feb 17, 2007 by Peter Reiser in Web 2.0  |  Comments[7]