How To Build An Enterprise 2.0 Culture

With so many entrepreneurs and investors seeing the value in adopting the culture and technology of Web 2.0, CIOs and CTOs are starting to implement these same methods into the Enterprise. “If it’s working on the web is should work within our organization right?” That mindset is creating an evolution of enterprise collaborative platforms within organizations like P&G, BEA, Intel, Cisco, Google and others. Should you consider social tools like blogs or wikis for your organization? Yes and if you haven’t they may already be available and present. If there isn’t an open forum outside of a 9:15am conference room meeting, you can bet that your staff is leveraging their own blog or an industry wiki to contribute their own intellectual insight into what’s happening. Somewhere inside those blogs posts, wiki comments and forum discussions are golden nuggets of information that could give executives some insight into the culture of the company, the next big idea or just reoccurring issues that need to be addressed before they get out of hand. Every person on your staff has something to say, so why not give them somewhere to say it. Enterprise 2.0 not only works on the internal area of your business; it provides valuable insight into the B2B arena. If you’ve created a tool or environment to manage your clients and there’s no feedback tools in place, you may be missing out on something that could take your customer service to the next level. Always constantly ask yourself, “What are the communication problems we can solve? How can we translate the communication needs of the users?” Now do you read this and head back to your CEO and tell them, we need a blog, wiki, forum and live chat. Turning the big ship takes time, so start off by implementing one new social tool into your organization and see what kind of feedback you get. Then test another tool, if it works out and the collaboration that results from this is exemplary, roll it out to your customers. What you’ll find is that the “user experience” isn’t just client-side it’s a part of your corporate culture.

If you still need some more information on Enterprise 2.0 and how to leverage this model for your organization, check out some of the following references:

• Enterprise 2.0: Ten Predictions for 2007 from Dion Hinchcliffe

• 100% Easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0 from Euan Semple

If you still need more, we just got back from the Web 2.0 Expo and I collected the following information from some of the big brands identified in the beginning of this post.

• Ross Mayfield, CEO of SocialText said, “Transform Corporate Culture!”
• BEA tied employees to their docs and presented their title for expertise clarification.
• Cisco is using podcasting for internal staff and sales staff for training since they are always on the go.