Excerpt the good/bad of Web 2.0 tools
Motorola is one of the biggest adopters of Web collaboration tools, with 4,400 blogs, 4,200 wiki pages, and 2,600 people actively doing content tagging and social bookmarking using Scuttle software, with more accessing the system. Under an initiative called Intranet 2.0, the tools are used mostly for research and information sharing–so instead of salespeople developing a whole new pitch for every client, they can reuse pieces of pitches posted on a wiki. Motorola employees also can more easily find people with experience in specific areas using social networking software from Visible Path or checking author pages on wikis. “It actually lets people see new relationships–to see maps of what smart people and like people have done,” says Toby Redshaw, Motorola’s VP in charge of Enterprise 2.0 technologies. The result is that the company is building knowledge centers around particular problems and products. That’s the end goal for Schueller–that employees and partners searching for information on the intranet, creating profiles, tagging documents, and sharing bookmarks make the content more valuable. Call it social software or user-generated content, the risk is that if people don’t find the tool useful out of the gate, they won’t contribute the content that builds this virtuous cycle. IT teams have a critical opportunity to make it worth people’s while. As one IT exec at the conference put it, “If they come, they will build it.”