Sunday, February 07, 2010

Enterprise 2.0 book review

Continuing on with my theme of Web 2.0 in my last few posts I thought I would review the book titled Enterprise 2.0.

The book uses case studies of organizations using social media; it goes over the benefits and pitfalls and how best to approach their adoption.

Enterprise 2.0 definition:
Is the use of emergent social software platforms by organizations in pursuit of their goals.

The book presents a road map for success concentrating on the roles played by business leaders-managers and executives outside the HR department. These leaders are the most important constituency for successful use of the newly available technologies of Enterprise 2.0.

The book includes 4 case studies from organizations that are actually using social media. Here are a couple of examples:

1. VistaPrint had a shared hard drive which people saved documentation and other reference work, but most people felt that it was disorganized and hard to search. The president of the company felt that as workers left VistaPrint the knowledge left with them and he felt that many time workers were trying the reinvent the wheel with projects. To solve this they installed MediaWiki with the goal of getting the company’s engineers to enter their accumulated knowledge into it. The end result was an easy to read, navigate and searchable system.

2. Serena Software is using Facebook to help build a stronger and more consistent corporate culture. They brought in staff members kids (many times high school and college aged) to teach people how to use the application. It was an immediate hit because it allowed people to keep up with strong and weak ties and in many cases allowed user to see what some of their project team members actually looked like.

Overall I think the book is a must read for anyone who is thinking about introducing web 2.0 concepts to their organization to address the fear that people won’t use the newly available tool and fears that they will.

The book is available at Amazon:

1 comment:

  1. Nice to read a review of the book.In fact I would say a informative and analytically review.I really appreciate the efforts you spent on writing this.Good job man!

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