The Sydney Morning Herald has a very interesting full-page article today by Brad Howarth titled It’s web take 2.0, which delves into some of the business applications of Web 2.0. It covers a broad range of technologies and companies, including social search engine Swicki, scalable virtual world Outback Online, community space Tangler, and Web 2.0 initiatives from Kimberly-Clark and World Wildlife Fund. The article links to this blog among a few other Web 2.0 references, and quotes me on the enterprise applications of Web 2.0:

According to social technologies researcher Ross Dawson, some information-intensive organisations, including law firms and banks, are the most active in investigating the benefits of web 2.0 technology, as an extension of ongoing knowledge management developments.

“Web 2.0 in the enterprise is about enabling people to better find information and work with it,” Mr Dawson says. “There are some sweet spots, which are very natural applications for blogs and wikis where it makes a lot of sense. And these are projects, competitive intelligence, and many other things where you are trying to get broad information and input on a specific topic.”

In the case of competitive intelligence, for instance, a wiki can be set up to allow employees to input information they may have learnt about their organisation’s competitors, and rely on their colleagues to collaborate or correct their entries. The same can be true of corporate blogs.

“There’s a lot of cynicism around whether it is worth doing or not, but done well, in the right sort of organisation, it is a way to get greater visibility and awareness of capabilities across the organisation.”

Mr Dawson also believes that blogs and wikis can become an alternative to email.

“Email as a communication platform is experiencing breakdown because people have too many emails. If you can start to shift activity outside of email, that’s enormously valuable and more effective and more productive.”

Many years ago I was already referring to “communication breakdown” in the corporate use of email (at the time about financial markets participants, whose email inboxes overflowed before anyone else’s…). The next phase of evolution of corporate communication and work processes must be about moving beyond email as a tool. People are familiar with it, and it provides a single portal to communication, but it is a massively ineffective tool for many business communication needs. Web 2.0 tools offer a ready-made, easy to use alternative for some business applications. Most projects, for example, would function far better using blogs or wikis instead of email for communication. There are certainly other approaches to transcending the email inbox as our primary communication tool. However Web 2.0 tools are already at hand to vastly improve corporate communication, if we choose to use them.

I’ve written at length before about these issues, including some of the investment banks’ initiatives and successes in moving beyond email, initiatives from IBM, blogging shifting into Enterprise 2.0, and so on.

In the next couple of weeks I’ll be releasing a Web 2.0 framework which will put into context both the consumer web and enterprise applications.

This Friday I’m doing a lunch presentation titled Knowledge, Networks, and Social Media in Melbourne to the KMLF (originally known as the Knowledge Management Liberation Front), a group of knowledge management practitioners, and the Victorian Public Sector Continuous Improvement Network. Details on the event are here – the organizers say all are welcome. The description of my presentation is:

Knowledge management has provided a foundation for many of the most exciting developments in business today. Network approaches, including social networking platforms, organisational network analysis and industry network development, are proving to be fundamental business tools. The media landscape is being transformed by social media, including blogs, podcasts, photo and video sharing, user filtering and how user content is being integrated into traditional media.

Enterprise 2.0 is the term being used to describe how enterprise blogs, wikis and other collaborative tools are transforming knowledge sharing and co-creation in the organisation. Those with a deep background in knowledge management are eminently qualified to apply their experience and skills to these transformative domains; they represent massive opportunities for KM practitioners to create value.

Back in the 1990s I was usually identified with the knowledge management (KM) movement (though I always disliked the term). From the beginning of this decade actively sought to disassociate myself from knowledge management, because I felt the term had already become archaic, and it certainly didn’t encompass the scope of my interests. In an article on The Future of Knowledge Management published in KM Review and other publications in 2004, I explained why I felt it was time to move on from knowledge management, at the time identifying five successors to the movement: social networks, collaboration, relevance, workflow, and knowledge-based relationships. Moving on, this year I have found a large proportion of my energy spent on the future of media and media strategy, closely linked to my work on social networks, both inside organizations and in technology-enabled social media.

What has struck me over the last years is that while knowledge management is not perceived as a highly dynamic space, the skills and capabilities that were developed in the 1990s and beyond within the knowledge management movement are immensely relevant today and in the future. The KM label is unfortunate, yet the issues practitioners have been grappling with for a long time now, such as fostering collaboration, virtual work, enhancing social networks, serving relevant information, reducing overload, and so on remain absolutely central issues. The terminology and tools have substantially moved on, yet the fundamental problems are not new. As such, the wheel does not need to be reinvented, and those who have been in the knowledge management space can apply their expertise with enormous relevance. The language has changed, and I personally don’t regret that KM has been largely sidelined as a term. Yet there are big opportunities for the people who can adapt the knowledge organization skills they have developed over the years, and the organizations who apply them.

I originally wrote about the open innovation model of Innocentive several years ago in Living Networks (see page 12 from selected excerpts from Living Networks). Last week The Economist named Innocentive’s chairman Alpheus Bingham winner of its business process innovation prize for developing the company. Innocentive was originally founded by Eli Lilly, which recognized that the solutions to specific issues in the drug development process may be easier to obtain outside the organization than by trying to do everything itself. By defining specific solutions that it is seeking, it can open participation in its R&D process to any scientist anywhere on the planet. Scientists win a pre-specified reward for solving the problem, and in return sign over the related intellectual property rights. Now other companies including Boeing, Dow, Ciba, DuPont, Procter & Gamble, and Novartis have joined Innocentive to seek their own solutions to R&D problems, helping build the critical mass which makes Innocentive a true innovation exchange. Innovation no longer needs to happen entirely in the one organization. It can be unbundled into different elements, allowing participation from the best and most relevant talent in the world. It is great to see Innocentive’s success, as this will help pave the way to more initiatives and new approaches to opening out the innovation process.

I’ve just spotted a recent article in BusinessWeek called The Power of Us that provides a great overview of how mass collaboration is driving the economy. It refers to a number of examples I described in detail in Living Networks, such as Eli Lilly’s Innocentive, which enables companies to draw the best innovators globally into their internal R&D programs. As evidenced again by the references in the article, the success of James Suriowecki’s outstanding book The Wisdom of Crowds has played a powerful part in making people realize that collaboration – if correctly designed – is far more powerful than any other approach. The tools and business models that support that will be central to the next phase of the global economy.