Category Archives: commentary

Well it was a great morning – we had a full house for the kick-off meeting of TAG‘s newest society, Enterprise 2.0.  Our society chair and vision leader, Sherry Heyl, did a great job acting as emcee and blog-journalist.  Check out her blow-by-blow report written live during the event.  And our featured speaker, Puneet Gupta, CEO of Connectbeam, gave a great summary and product demonstration, which I think helped to open our audience’s eyes to the advantages of well-managed social bookmarking in a corporate context.

The point I keep coming back to when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 is the idea that the trend toward adoption of social computing tools is already widespread – the people in your corporation are already using these tools and operating on different paradigms of communication.  The younger the employee the more likely they are to be “infected” with a web 2.0/social media mindset.  These are the people being hired by companies big and small every day.  Whether you choose to put an Enterprise 2.0 strategy in place for your organization, there is already a strong contingent of users who know from direct experience that there are other choices for communication and collaboration than those that may be already blessed by your IT department.  Progressive companies will recognize this and do what is necessary to keep apace of this wave of innovation and cultural change.  They’ll do it because they know that the young upstarts – the ones with no baggage are already there – and they are moving nimbly forward, unfettered by old-school command and control driven approaches.  The people know the tools, and like ’em and knowing the taste of transparent collaboration it is hard to go back to restricted access and cumbersome methods.  Today policies of restriction and banned IP addresses may be met with grumbling compliance – tomorrow the response might be rebellion and defection.

The Connectbeam offering was a great focal point for our first session because the concept of bookmarking is so well understood by virtually anyone who has used a browser in the last decade or so.  Shared bookmarking doesn’t require learning new and complicated skills, but through relevance algorithms and intelligent use of meta-data the social bookmarker gains advantages over the older tool.   Data becomes more meaningful and portable.  Communities of shared interest grow organically from the clustering of bookmarks and knowledge centers are exposed throughout the organization.  Now who wouldn’t want that power working for their corporation?