Web 2.0 Tools at Eastern Mountain Sports
In an article in the January issue of Optimize magazine, Jeffrey Neville, the CIO at Eastern Mountain Sports, explains how his company is actively expanding its internal and external use of Web 2.0 tools. The EMS experience suggests ideas for other organizations that are looking to facilitate collaboration both among employees and with suppliers and customers.Neville points out that many EMS employees use Web 2.0 tools in their personal lives and "want to apply the same sorts of tools in the work environment, and to easily access data that's tailored to the roles they play in the organization and the business metircs they influence."
The particularly interesting wrinkle at EMS is that the company is integrating RSS feeds, wikis, and blogs with its corporate scoreboard, which tracks about 20 operational metrics. Neville explains that
... Web 2.0 tools encourage collaboration within our analytic dashboards — not only to find, summarize, and integrate relevant data, but also to ease the process of sharing it with internal and external stakeholders in an interactive way. We use RSS feeds to report on exceptions and alert users when certain operational metrics are out of tolerance range.Down the road, EMS plans to set up a wiki for employees to use to propose, test, and refine hypotheses, e.g., proposed explanations for why Item A sells better than Item B. Blogs will be used to collect ideas relating to "a piece of data or a key metric."
The plan for exploiting the collaborative nature of Web 2.0 tools includes a plan for making sure everyone in the company has the skills they need in order to participate. Presumably, that means making training — informal and/or formal — available to anyone who is not already up-to-speed due to personal experience on the Web.
Labels: Collaboration, Usability, Web 2.0
posted by Karen Nelson @ 5:05 PM
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