2.0 for Enterprise and Education in 2009
All the articles, posts, feeds and twitters on educational and organizational 2.0 initiatives all exhibit the same discussions, question marks and feel of urgency. There’s something going on. Question is: what will probably happen in 2009?
Well, first of all, not all developments seems to be that powerful. There’s a good deal of doubt about some phenomenons.
One doubt is that some information just can’t be trusted. A survey from Q2 2008 showed how people ranked the trustworthiness of information from different sources. This showed that only 16% of the readers of company blogs trusted the information presented there. When employees share their opinions, knowledge and work with the world, what of those are company statements and what are personal thoughts and opinions? The fact is that we cannot know for sure. Organizations should think carefully about starting a blog: it’s probably not the most effective way to communicate and lets face it, organizations and opinions don’t always go well together.
Another doubt is that existing social networks are not very suitable for collaboration. I’m not talking about (cloud-based or on premise) collaboration software or communication software, like project management or conference applications. I’m talking about social networks. We can share opinions and even knowledge on those platforms, but real collaboration doesn’t seem to evolve from that. The current social networks are probably more interesting for job or opportunity seeking professionals than they are for organizations. Public social networks expand the individual possibilities rather than the institutional ones. In that perspective I believe that in-company social networks only work when they are servicing real big and/or international operating organizations and for the same reasons: expansion of possibilities.
And what about in-company knowledge management systems. Is it worthwhile to invest in those? For the operation and maintenance of custom made technical systems this might be true, but in most cases in-company knowledge base systems can’t compete with the worldwide available knowledge bases or the knowledge bases from system vendors.
And how about education. A new generation of students arrived, the digital natives. They learn by incident, as needed or at a “just in case” basis. They use their social networks to solve problems. They can process information differently (first visual, from a stream, non-lineair, then text, lineair) but do they really learn differently? Or is this new way of information processing just an added feature? Fact is, to reach some level of abstraction in knowledge, one have to recognize constructions, whether they are mathematical, linguistic, technical or scientific theories, and so on. This is what we learn students. And there is a need for this guidance (nothing new here). In the Netherlands, a very well connected country, a recent survey showed that students have a problem finding the right information on the web. There is a problem with the overload of commercial information and with the validation of information. Students do have a problem finding the right, validated, true stuff. As a solution, a new search engine (based on google) was build to search within approved academic, school and public libraries.
This is where we stand. Not that spectacular. But there are some interesting developments going on. Maybe not that spectacular, but interesting nonetheless.
So what are the possibilities? What about co-creation initiatives and social designing. A real opportunity to participate, to learn and get rewarded. A great possibility for students to engage real world tasks. And there are chances for companies too: they can get their work done in a complete new way and get in touch with a broader community of professionals, students and a new generation of colleagues.
And what about getting in touch with customers? Customers could participate in various improvement programs and processes. Organizations could use and exploit the the wisdom of the crowds.
There is a lot of cooperation software out there. Working together on projects, cross company, is really easy nowadays and this will bring new opportunities too. But new web based software has to be build to realize new cooperation goals: meeting the customers, creating a world-wide network of professionals, manage competencies, working with students.
There’s a new year ahead of us with numerous opportunities . Let’s see what happens. Next year we will evaluate this post.