Enterprise 2.0 Features Won't Dictate Success
Enterprise 2.0 may appear on an ever increasing number of business plans, and a recent article on Sharepoint gives a perspective on potential benefits, though this rush of web 2.0 features built into content management products will not be enough to deliver a thriving online community to an organisation.
Offering employees activity feeds, tags, notes and other functions it is assumed that tangible organisational benefits will occur.
Seeking to emulate the water cooler or tea break conversation online is not I think a realistic option.
For one thing most employees will not write down in electronic form what they wish to remain private. It could be used against them and often people say things in haste which they may regret.
As far as communication goes the key point about the tea break is that employees are not actually a their desk but away from it. They are more relaxed as they feel they are taking a break from the workplace so using Sharepoint wouldn't necessarily be an attractive option.
Also speaking is quicker and easier for most people than typing so the social tools built into a content management system for use within an organisation are not necessarily go to yield massive rewards anyway.
Asking employees to tag content also exposes it to the criticisms of the Folksonomy. It's good in an informal setting though time can wasted trying to figure out what a particular employee has tagged something until such a time as a shared vocabulary emerges. In the short term this could be manipulated by having a restricted number of tags but this would impact the spirit of giving the user the freedom to tag content in the first place.
I have seen Wikis sometimes successfully used as an area to link and pull together information from a department and if the department are on board and regularly updating it with information then this could be an option.
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