Bring Web 2.0 Tools to Your Intranet
Anybody who has found life is easier nowadays because of Web-based search tools and information-rich sites like Wikipedia should be keeping track of how these "Web 2.0" tools can be adapted to corporate intranets.In the latest issue of the Sloan Management Review, Andrew P. McAfee, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, offers an overview of use of tools like blogs and wikis in the corporate setting. His description and analysis is based on research at a number of companies that have introduced Web 2.0 tools.
McAfee uses the acronym SLATES to reference the tools:
Search — Addition of the Google toolbar (or a similar search tool) has made retrieving information from a corporate intranet much more practical than when people were limited to using the intranet's navigation tools.
Links — When a search tool returns a list of search results, the pages are in order according to how frequently people link to them. In other words, the order reflects the collective judgment of users concerning the relative importance of the pages listed.
Authoring — People who might hesitate to contribute information about their practices and work products to rigidly structured knowledge management systems, are more likely to share expertise via blogs and wikis.
Tags — Instead of having the intranet webmaster and staff decide on how to categorize content, users supply tags that they choose themselves. To see how this works, you can have a look at del.icio.us, a site that enables people to organize their Web bookmarks — and to see how other people are categorizing favorite websites.
Extensions — In the same way that Amazon uses your purchases to come up with recommendations of other items that might appeal to you, a corporate intranet can use extension tools to help a user find relevant information that the user might not think to look up without a helpful hint.
Signals — By using a tool like RSS (Really Simple Syndication), users can be alerted when new content of interest has been added to the intranet. This saves time because users don't have to make a point of checking from time to time to see if anything new has appeared.
By adopting Web 2.0 tools, a company can ensure that its intranet is continuously updated. Just as important, the updating reflects everyone's interlinked work so that the processes people use to accomplish their work are more visible and more easily accessible.
Labels: Web 2.0
posted by Karen Nelson @ 1:04 PM
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