John Newton, Alfresco, posted a well written article on the business changes Web 2.0 will continue to the enterprise.  I especially not liked what he had to say about the strength of social publishing tools for knowledge sharing within a company, but also Web 2.0's strength to blend required knowledge available both inside and outside the organization.

These web sites will set further expectations on the internal systems you use and a requirement to integrate internal information with these external sources of information. Web 2.0 has an answer for this as well with an integration technique known as "mash up", the ability mix information from multiple sources using the web browser itself as the point of integration. These external sources of information also provide something that our internal information systems could never provide, a critical mass of opinion utilizing the Wisdom of the Crowds. We will ultimately need to combine external opinion with our internal opinion to get more accurate predictive decision making with our own unique insights inside the enterprise.

When I read what John has written, I can't help but think of our previous discussions on the strength of weak ties.  Companies that are willing to seek out knowledge internally and externally of their control boundaries are likely to have a greater business advantage over those companies that prevent their workers from taking the discussion beyond the office walls.  What a boring life that would be to only be able to talk to colleagues that wear only the same company logo you are wearing?  Companies need to accept the changes that are about to take place as their youngest workers will likely want and need to collaborate with more than just their fellow employees.  The world via social publishing offers their workers more than what most single companies can provide alone.

Intelligent Enterprise: A new Ventana Research report finds that most companies are falling short on the basics of performance management. Here are five sets of diagnostic questions as well as best practices for broader, more responsive and more effective planning and budgeting.

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"It further does not take a great leap to see how business executives could greatly benefit from being able to measure and monitor their energy and materials use in real time and share that information via a closed social network within their own company."

Eric Lundquist, "New Role for Social Networks", eWeek, March 14, 2008

"Business leaders need to incorporate innovation, efficiency and abandonment as a means for reaching greater success.

Jeff Bezos is not one to let dust settle on his shelves. The founder and CEO of Amazon, the world’s largest online reseller, routinely abandons operations and ideas that aren’t yielding their intended results. He calls these “defects,” or inefficiencies in operations. When these defects are eliminated, costs fall and result in Amazon being able to offer customers lower prices and new frills."

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"Web 2.0 is at the center of a wave of excitement concerning how enterprises—commercial or public organisations—are trying to exploit the current generation of Internet technologies. This four-part article series examines aspects of Web 2.0 relevant to the enterprise. In this first installment, take a look at the business and technical drivers behind Web 2.0, the challenges and opportunities Web 2.0 presents to enterprises, and the relationship between Web 2.0 and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA)."

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"While the Microsoft / Facebook expanded partnership announcement made earlier today doesn't have anything to do with SharePoint, the publicity it generated will likely get a lot more people to start thinking or asking about the value of social networking capabilities within an enterprise and between a company and its business partners as well as its customers. Eric Charran (Senior Consultant in Microsoft Consulting Services), Dino Dato-on (SharePoint Ranger), and Greg Lang (Program Manager for Microsoft Enterprise Services Communities Tools and Infrastructure) have written a soon to be published white paper that addresses the topic of the importance of social networking in an organization and how to properly implement MOSS 2007 as a social networking solution."

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A couple days ago my jaw dropped when I read CMS Watch's article, "Do you need an ECMS, WCMS, or Portal?".   Last week, Deane Barker of Blend Interactive and Gadgetopia had mentioned how he was uncomfortable seeing enterprise content management systems and Web content management systems lumped together in the same comparison article.  I responded to him that the boundaries between the two information systems do seem to get blurrier and blurrier all the time.  In the CMS Watch article, Tony Byrne writes, "Sometimes it's hard to know. The lines between all content technology families are notoriously blurry."

It would seem to me that as we continue on this Web 2.0 journey where content is being mashed together...the management systems  themselves are going through their own sort of mash-up.  However, Tony Byrne's article emphasizes that indeed while these management systems can overlap one another there are still distinctions between the two.  If you're more interested in publishing a WCMS will fit you just fine, but if you're needing to focus more on business process then an ECMS must be looked at.

Why don’t IT people get more respect? On this Labor Day, things are actually looking better for people who work in corporate IT. Budgets aren’t quite so tight. Companies are hiring. Interesting IT projects are getting a green light. But when it comes to how our fellow employees think about us, IT work is a train wreck. Users break the rules we set up, ignore the proc­esses we develop and generally act as if we’re clueless in what we do.

Businesses and organizations that have large amounts of information to provide to users need a method for guiding that information from creation through editing, approval, publishing and maintenance to archiving. This process is generally referred to as content management. While the concept of content management has been around for a long time—newspapers have been using it for decades—it’s a relatively new term for most people.