Cannell.org/blog

Some great comments during Ross Mayfield's recent CIO interview.

The net gens, the 16 to 24 year olds, have grown up using the Internet as part of their daily life. This generation, the biggest demographic shift in history, is going to profoundly impact the enterprise. These are the folks who grew up doing their homework on Facebook, and at school that was called cheating. And they come to the workforce and do the same thing and it's called collaboration. They grew up using social software. They've actually look down on email. They think email is only for formal legal business communication. They've got five to seven instant messaging windows open at any one time. They're blogging. They're on social network tools. They leverage Wikipedia as much as they can. And then they come to the workforce and they're given SAP.

But perhaps the best advice from Ross was shared earlier in the interview: "four core areas that pop up in almost every single enterprise deployment that we end up doing":

1. "collaborative intelligence" - "It's the pattern of the core publishing to the edge, the edge giving feedback, and the edge interacting with the edge. So for example, in marketing and sales operations, you need to communicate to the field organization about an ever changing product line."
2. "participatory knowledge base" - Ross highlights a good example with a Dell call center that handles exceptions. The wiki provided a way to capture and then easily recall solutions found during previous calls.
3. "flexible client collaboration" - "This is a professional services firm or other kind of group that sets up a collaborative workspace between them and the client."
4. "business social networks" - "with your business partners or it's with your customers, where you're communicating to them, getting feedback from them, and they're interacting directly."

These look like patterns (it could also be Ross' use of the word "pattern" that clued me in :-) so I looked for these in wikipatterns and couldn't find any alignment. Perhaps the use cases Ross speaks of are meta-patterns and wikipatterns offer practical day-to-day best practices for implementations.

Enterprise Wikis Seen As a Way to End 'Reply-All' E-Mail Threads

[18-Mar-08 updated: title changed based on feedback from Ross and Stewart]