Mare Nostrum

Web 2.0 and the organization man

Most of the commentary about Web 2.0 comes from developers, journalists, and devotees.Therefore, it's hard to jam blogs, Wikis, mash-ups, and other Web 2.0 technologies into the frame of corporate America That's no surprise, since the management of these organizations don't yet feel comfortable with the loss of informational control that Web 2.0 might represent.

This clash of cultures, between the Ajax developer and the CFO, is what makes deliberate efforts to fit Web 2.0 into the corporate world interesting. At the Gartner conference i just attended, I heard the author of Wikinomics, Don Tapscott, make his now-familiar argument that the revolution is effectively over, and companies need to just get over it.

While exhortation has its place, so does a more granular analysis of what individual companies are doing well or poorly to incorporate Web 2.0 into their organizations. To get that picture, you need to read publications like the blog maintained by two Forrester researchers, Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff. They'll tell you how beverage companies are trying to glom onto social netowrking, or how Disney is building a portal pitched at young parents.

An early conclusions: Everyone can agree that Wikis are a good thing. Blogs got the spotlight for a long time, and they continue to have their role. However, corporations (and government agencies, non-profits, and educational institutions, for that matter) need a more departmental, less conversational tool. Wikis are "WCM for the rest of us," an easy way for groups to maintain official information of interest to them, or anyone who works with them, withot the overhead of a traditional web content management system.

Wikis aren't perfect, though. I'll have more to say about them in future posts.