Archive for December, 2007

Enterprise 2.0

Thursday, December 27th, 2007

“Enterprise 2.0 in general describes the liberation of often previously inaccessible corporate information to be opened up to general discoverability, consumption, and reuse using a Web-based model”

The above quote as defined by Dion Hinchcliffe in his blog entry gives a good idea of what the new generation of tools try to achieve. And in defining this as part of what “enterprise 2.0″ tries to solve he also confirm my own experiences with modern enterprises. Information of any kind is hard to come by, and only a fraction of it ends up on internal web-sites where new team members can find it. Most information is documented in old emails, documents or notes from previous projects. Or worse, it is undocumented and hidden within the brains of key staff and a product of experience that new employees will only get after years of work.

PeerAware tries to unlock some of the information, and does so by letting employees share information from their own document collections, and by letting team members collaborate through searching and browsing shared documents, real-time chat and very soon through a shared whiteboard. But PeerAware does not solve all problems, and can in fact create new ones. Jerry Bowles’ post, Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0 highlights some of the issues that also affect PeerAware:

Technological Barriers
1. How can I be certain that the information that is gathered and shared behind the firewall stays behind the firewall?
2. How do I control who has access to particular levels of information and databases?
3. How do I protect the integrity of the information from malicious tampering by disgruntled employees or managers?
4. How can I be sure that information is being “tagged” properly for efficient retrieval later?
5. What kind of training do employees need before they can effectively use the technology?

Cultural Barriers
6. How can I monitor the system to make certain that what individuals are saying and sharing reflects company policy?
7. What are the legal dangers in saving and sharing so much loosely supervised input?
8. How do I distinguish “productive” use of the technology from horsing around?
9. How do I “manage” the gathering and disseminating of so much unstructured information?
10. How do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth out of the investment in technology?

Many of these questions center around one issue. How do I control who has access to information and how do I keep that information away from everyone else. This is risk management for information workers, and in PeerAware I attempt to solve this through access control for workspaces. This is important, but a smaller problem than all the information that is kept hidden within a business.

I expect PeerAware to solve more problems than it creates, and by being aware of potential issues, policies can be implemented tho avoid these issues.

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