Enterprise 2.0 is probably closer to Web 3.0
than to Web 2.0. Why? Because Web 2.0 has been all about bringing
people together in communities of interest, in an infrastructure that
displays user-generated knowledge. But the next version of
the Web will focus on the intelligent retrieval of that knowledge. This
is precisely where the next version of the enterprise will aim.
The modern enterprise has already brought its people together in communities of interest, albeit arranged by diktat
rather than organic process. Bringing the social, self-organizing tools
of Web 2.0 into the infrastructure – wikis, review systems, intranet
blogs, etc – enables the enterprise to loosen its structural muscles
and exercise them at the same time.
This is a condition of better health, and a step along the path of training that arrives at Agility, which in terms of survival is the Olympic Gold Medal standard.
Enterprise
2.0 speaks to scenarios wherein all the workers of the organization are
organically able to collaborate with each other in ad hoc communities
of interest, and focus groups brought together by individual
circumstance.
But Enterprise 2.0 is not a people
revolution, it’s a knowledge revolution. Collaboration is not being
made easy simply because bosses suddenly feel a rush of sympathy for
their workers’ desire to hang out with their friends. It’s happening
because the efficient disposition of corporate data is a survival
necessity today, and loosening some of the former hierarchy is a useful
part of freeing information within the enterprise.
Companies need to retrieve the tacit knowledge
held in the unrecorded and hitherto unexpressed experience of its
workers. At the same time, workers at every customer touchpoint and at
every process milestone or impromptu decision gate need the full
benefit of all the company’s relevant knowledge in an ad hoc burst of
instant training. This convenient two-way street between tacit and
explicit knowledge is a perfect job for software.
Why
could this kind of knowledge sharing not happen in analog systems? The
answer is that it has, for thousands of years, and it has required a
rigid hierarchy of governance to ensure that data flows where it
should, and not where it shouldn’t.
The advent of
digitized knowledge changes everything. Knowledge reduced to text is
explicit, and can be digitized, and meta-described, and managed by
software.
This is why spoken voice is only used in
knowledge management to the extent that it can be transcribed. Don’t
look for a network of podcasts and speakerphones to become the
enterprise knowledge management system, not unless perfect text
transcription accompanies them. Voice recognition is still not perfect,
but is hugely important for the future capture of ambient knowledge.
The
evolution of the Web affords the enterprise a laboratory study of its
own potential. We can think of the Web as a large proving ground for
network techniques and technologies. Even as the enterprise struggles
to reap the benefits of the Web 2.0 harvest, Web 3.0 is looming larger.
“Others will try to keep their information
proprietary, but it will be opened via mashups created using services
like Dapper, Teqlo and Yahoo! Pipes. The net effect will be that
unstructured information will give way to structured information –
paving the road to more intelligent computing.” – Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services
