This week in links - week 21, 2008

"EMC's Documentum and eRoom gets a 2.0 make over with 'Magellan'" by James Dellow:

EMC's Documentum and eRoom are already widely deployed enterprise content and
collaboration tools and their new proposed client platform, Magellan, could provide an alternative to Microsoft SharePoint (for collaboration) and IBM's Connections/Quickr. From the end-user perspective, Magellan will provide Web 2.0 collaboration features, such as Wikis, blogs, RSS, and tagging.

"It's Not The Data, It's The Flow" by Fred Wilson:

Social web services need not fear data portability. They need to fear others providing a better experience. Because when others do that, the flow of data moves and they aren't in the middle anymore. They might still have your data but they won't have you. And that's where the value is.

"Why change management is critical to Web 2.0 success" by Neil Davey:

A survey of 1,800 executives worldwide by McKinsey last year, for instance, revealed that a fifth of them were already using blogs to improve customer service or solicit customer feedback. It’s a sure bet that 2008 will see firms not only exploring blogs, but also peer to peer networking, social networks and podcasts.

But rolling out social software in an organisation isn’t akin to buying another version of Oracle. There is a certain degree of organisational readiness that needs to be achieved in order to successfully deploy and absorb the changes associated with implementing social software. And the change management necessary to precede such a Web 2.0 strategy has caught many businesses unaware

Web 2.0 practitioner and author of 'Winning by Sharing' Leon Benjamin is in agreement with the findings. "To participate in a network, a company must itself be network-centric," he explains. "Unfortunately this means taking a conscious decision to dismantle hierarchical organisation. Democratising decision making (crowd sourcing), creating openness and transparency is a big step for large organisations in particular. For most of them, this is still a step too far. That is where you get the major resistance. People suddenly worry about being more transparent, anybody can talk to anybody. And that is a really big problem for some people high up in some organisations."