Column Two

When it comes to enterprise 2.0, every vendor wants to own the user

Written by James Robertson, published June 16, 2009

Categorised under: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets

Interest in enterprise 2.0 and collaboration remains high within organisations, despite the economic downturn. The range of tools in the marketplace is growing, and capabilities are improving. So far, all good.

The challenge is, however, to work out where to fit these tools in the enterprise landscape. Most organisations have a well-established intranet, alongside other web applications (HR self-service, timesheets, finance, etc). Staff log on to the intranet, read the news on the intranet home page, and then follow links to further content and applications.

Now there is interest in a whole new general of “social” tools, including blogs, wikis, team spaces, instant messaging, Twitter-like tools, or an “internal Facebook”. There are some great tools for all of these capabilities, often in combination.

The problem is that most of these tools want “own the user”. They want to be the first point of login, and often manage their own set of user identities, separately from other systems (even when Active Directory or LDAP is in place). This is not a new problem, and the earlier generation of portal products suffered from the same problems.

What we don’t want to end up with is a large intranet, a separate “internal Wikipedia”, a wiki-based collaboration space (with its own home page), and a separate collection of team-based spaces (also with their own login). This is tremendously confusing for staff, who don’t know where to start, or where to look. “The answer to my question: is it on the intranet? or perhaps in the wiki? or has it been published in a team site?”

On a very practical level, this makes it very hard for organisations to start into enterprise 2.0 without immediately creating new silos of information. Ideally, we could just enhance the existing staff profiles on the intranet with some social capabilities, or seamlessly integrate wikis into specific sections of the site.

Now if you’re IBM, you can spend a lot of resources binding all these together seamlessly when creating your own intranet (W3). Alternatively, if you’re a small to medium-sized organisation, using a wiki-based intranet (or other social tool) may make perfect sense, particularly when starting from a green-fields situation.

Most organisations, however, have to buy a tool (or obtain an open-source package), and then try to align it with the existing sites and platforms. Customisation is is costly and difficult to justify. This makes adding social capabilities much harder than it should be, and limits the ability to experiment in a sustainable and scalable way.

Ideally, I would like vendors to focus on “plug-ins” rather than full-featured tools. That way we could get a set of .NET, PHP or Java “applets” that could build on top of Active Directory or LDAP, and then be easily integrated into our existing intranets. Pick one feature, pick six, deploy as required.

At the end of the day, it’s all about maintaining a simple user experience for staff, while increasing the richness of interactions. Is that too much to ask for?

What have your experiences been? Have you found ways to overcome these challenges?

Vendors: what are your thoughts?

Tags: Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets