Connecting the creators, thinkers and doers
Published by Niall Cook December 18th, 2006 in Enterprise bookmarkingUpdate 19 Dec 2006: Euan Semple distinguishes between different types of people and different types of behaviour.
In Information Week’s article of 11 December (’Innovators & Influencers: From Web 2.0 to Enterprise 2.0‘), JP Rangaswami said something that’s had me thinking about the role of enterprise bookmarking systems like Cogenz for the last few days.
When asked about the respective roles of blogs and wikis in organizations, he said that blogs are for the “creators and thinkers†whereas wikis are “about doing things rather than thinking about thingsâ€.
If you don’t know, Rangaswami is ex-CIO of investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (an oft-cited Socialtext case study) and now CIO of BT Global Services, so he’s someone worth listening to.
Call me predictable, but it strikes me that for organizations already using blogs and wikis the ideal way to connect the things that people create, think and do online is to give them the tools to store, share and discover it.
Creators and thinkers need stimuli - internal and external - and many will want to capture and organize these before blogging their thoughts. Some may even be already doing it publicly (or worse, privately) in an uncontrolled environment like del.icio.us.
Likewise, doers are creating content that others may want to refer to - tomorrow, next week, or at some other point in the future. By posting it into an enterprise bookmarking system, they can help others discover it.
I’d argue that there is a fourth type - the connector. They may not be a creator, a thinker or a doer (at least not in the blog or wiki sense). But by tagging the blog posts and wiki pages that they find interesting, they automatically - perhaps even unwittingly - create connections between intellectual property and the people who create it. The tags they use to “describe†these resources become the glue that holds the whole continuum together.
Imagine a situation where the organizational thoughts and actions that reside in corporate blogs and wikis can be aggregated based on the meaning bestowed upon it by others. Even better, imagine how this collective intelligence could be fed back into those blog posts or wiki pages, displaying the tags others are using to describe it, the names of those who found it interesting, and links to other related posts or pages.
If I’m being honest, enterprise bookmarking has probably found it difficult to demonstrate its value alongside blogs and wikis. As companies begin to discover the differences between the two that Rangaswami describes, maybe this will become much clearer.
What do you think?
Hi Niall — From your post, it looks like you may not have dipped into Malcolm Gladwell’s wonderful book, The Tipping Point. If not, I recommend it as essential reading - all the more for someone involved in social software.
I couldn’t disagree more strongly with “enterprise bookmarking has probably found it difficult to demonstrate its value alongside blogs and wikis.” We’ve had wikis since 1995, and only now are they beginning to proliferate. We’ve had blogs since 1999. In 2002, Evan and the other founders of Blogger were overworked and thinking about shutting down! Then the phenomenon was picked up — at an astonishing scale! Still, that’s 3 long years before people saw the value proposition.
Social bookmarking has scaled up faster than either of these previous social software phenomena. At Connectbeam (http://www.connectbeam.com), as we work privately with Fortune 500 companies, we are finding that they have already made the business case on their own; they are - to our surprise, admittedly - ready to discuss enterprise-wide rollouts.