Met with another government agency today, to discuss about social software for the enterprise, or Enterprise 2.0. As I mentioned before there’s a hugh difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0, and implementing social software solutions within the firewall is not that common. Yet.
The meeting was actually a lead from the KM Summit I lectured a month ago, and today I met the KM Manager of that agency. They are a pretty large agency, with couple departments, already using internal portal and other KM tools, so they are quite advanced in that aspect. Still, Enterprise 2.0 is something entirely different.
When we started talking freely about the value and benefits of Enterprise 2.0 I decided to try the facebook test, out of the blue. I didn’t rehearse this before the meeting, it was an ad-hoc attempt, to see how many employees are members of that government agency group on facebook.
We found over 20 different groups, in one of them – 500 members. Impressive.
What did we learn?
First, the demand is out there, people want to share their content and connect online. It’s their way of communicating with the world, and even with their friends.
Second, when lacking the right tools within the firewall, they turn to tools outside the firewall, sharing content that should have stayed inside.
Third, it’s time to seriously consider Enterprise 2.0 tools. And that’s the hard part.
