This week in links - week 24, 2008

My list of links this week is dominated by links to posts and articles about the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston.

"Developing business rationales for an enterprise 2.0 strategy" by David Spark:

Pete Fields, Senior VP eCommerce division at Wachovia, told his company’s story of the process they went through to determine the business rationales for deploying social networking across the enterprise...//...Wachovia’s business rationales for deploying social networking tools across the enterprise were:

• Work more effectively across time and distance
• Better connect and engage employees
• Mitigate the impact of a maturing workforce
• Engage the Gen Y worker

Not nearly as impactful as the first four, here are Wachovia’s last five rationales.

• Position Wachovia as innovative and forward thinking
• Lift general employee engagement
• Reduce travel expenses
• Provide employees world-class tools with which to compete for business
• Support other key corporate initiatives like going paperless

"Geek breakfast, email and RSS observations..." by Martin Koser:

RSS is a technology, which in my perspective is still underrated - this holds true also in corporate settings. RSS can ease the life of knowledge workers, yes this is an obvious fact, but one that got reinforced today in the sessions I attended yesterday at the BarCamp Bodensee. Yet, a big problem is awareness - it’s hard to teach people, you have to help them giving it a try, and help them see how RSS comes in when dealing with information work.

I agree. I personally think it is frustrating that so many yet haven't discovered the value of RSS because if they would, the value of RSS would increase also for me as we then would have an easy way to share information with each other.

"Enterprise 2.0: CIA's Secret Intellipedia Has Universal Relevance" By W. David Gardner:

Two officials from the Central Intelligence Agency told an overflow audience at the Enterprise 2.0 conference Tuesday that they use popular Web 2.0 tools like wikis and blogs in their pioneering Intellipedia intelligence database.

The wiki-like application fills the all-important role of providing information in an easily-accessible location for members of intelligence community agencies. In this way, the wiki is a solution to the age-old problem of getting important information into the hands of intelligence agency people who can put it to good use.

Dennehy [one of the officials] offered one piece of advice to IT workers thinking of establishing a pioneering wiki project: "Start small. Make barriers small."

Interesting that CIA recommends that you make barriers small. Maybe something to think about for the security guys at the IT department who protect everything by default?

"Waiting for virtual environments to become boring" by Roland Legrand:

Time to refer to Here Comes Everybody (Clay Shirky). Somewhere in this book Clay says that the transformative potential of a technology on society is realized when that technology becomes boring. Old enough people remember the days when office workers watched fascinated how the first faxes where being transmitted, and later on when the first emails where actually being used in the office, or the first time access was granted to the World Wide Web in the office.

I'm reading this book by Clay Shirky as well. There are many good thoughts coming from that man. A definite must read.