Why Should ECM and Social Software Coexist?
The Enterprise 2.0 shift—moving beyond centralized storage and management of business content to a more decentralized and social approach.
Over the last 15 years or so, most companies have taken a very static, hierarchical and centralized approach to enterprise content management (ECM). Knowledge managers and IT departments have led the way, deploying blue-chip ECM platforms which are pushed top-down throughout the enterprise. At the same time, managers and their teams have been left out of the decision-making process, with absolutely no say in the ECM solution or the content and publishing tools they need in order to get their jobs done.
This top-down, “one shoe fits all” ECM strategy isn’t working. Companies are still struggling with information silos, isolated knowledge workers and a limited understanding of organizational expertise. And, sad but true, most employees still rely on email as their primary content management and collaboration tool while at work. According to Gartner, this heavy reliance on email can take up to 20% of a typical knowledge worker’s day—reading, responding and managing their personal inbox. And the productivity loss is staggering, easily exceeding millions of dollars for the average mid-size company.
Enter Web 2.0—the game changer for ECM and the savior for email inboxes everywhere. A new set of tools, philosophies and solutions that are being applied to this age-old problem.
Enterprise 2.0: Corporate, Teams and Individuals
Consider a new approach to enterprise content management—one that focuses not only on corporate needs, but also the needs of our teams and employees. Traditional ECM solutions have done a good job managing documents, while mitigating risk and ensuring corporate compliance. But they have failed miserably in meeting the needs of your teams and employees. At the team level, goals, objectives and milestones drive a collective effort and content is focused on project plans, data analysis and business cases. At the individual level, content needs are based around personal roles and responsibilities, including tasks, activities, files and even business relationships.
This is where the Web 2.0 movement comes into play. Web 2.0 in the enterprise is about empowerment, favoring organizational flatness and decentralization over centralized power and control. It's all about connecting people, information and processes across your entire company to form a networked organization, where people and teams can work together regardless of where they live, their title or their status in the company.
So, how can Web 2.0 technologies connect people with information when most enterprise libraries are filled with overwhelming amounts of static, outdated and seldom used corporate documents? After all, many ECM platforms are affectionately known as “the place where documents go to die.” This doesn’t have to be the case. Why not give each department, business unit and/or project team ownership and control over their content? Let them choose the applications they use to create content (e.g. message, blog, wiki, forum, video or document) and control how it’s named, tagged, stored and organized. You can even go a step further and give each team the ability to publish or share content (with the appropriate controls, moderation and governance) to the broader corporate enterprise.
Socializing Content Turns it into Knowledge
By creating an interconnected network of spaces, you decentralize your enterprise content and make it more accessible, relative and useful to your employees and teams. But, it’s still content—not knowledge. It has no history, context or value to the company. By implementing social content and collaboration tools, you can add context and value to any type of corporate content. That way, employees know: who created it, what people think about it, where it’s being used, why it was created and how it relates to other pieces of content and activities in the company. And when you socialize your enterprise content, you immediately begin to transform it into corporate knowledge.
Remember: content is king, but knowledge is power.
IGLOO is an enterprise social software company that builds social intranets and extranets in the cloud. Uniting content management, collaboration and social networking software in one integrated community suite, IGLOO helps to tear down the walls that prevent people from connecting, communicating and collaborating with each other.
To learn more about IGLOO’s social intranets, visit www.igloosoftware.com/solutions/intranet.