Seen a few posts suggesting that this is going to be the year of Enterprise 2.0. I hope so. I’ll be trying to do my bit. The economic benefits to companies that adopt web 2.0 tools in their business are huge.
There is a steady flow of incredibly valuable human capital flowing through the worlds large corporations. Most of this human capital only stays a couple of years in any job. The footprint left is often limited. Imagine, however, if in the short time that a person is in a job the company was able to capture the sum of their knowledge. It’s time that companies started damming the flow of human capital. When you employ someone you’re not just buying an automaton to perform processes for you. You are buying their lifetime of experiences and learning. From the second that an employee starts, the company should be looking to capture that experience. This can be done so simply by transferring their workplace from the Windows desktop to the public cloud.
At the moment everything in business is, by default, private. This needs to change. Everything by default should be public (contained within the company).
Companies have typically been afraid of internal blogging. Worried about what employees might say. This is an extraordinary attitude. These people cost a fortune to recruit and retain. Why go to all the trouble of employing people and then gag them? Companies should be forcing them to blog. Demanding that they share their knowledge. Demanding that they share the links that they find. Not blogging, not bookmarking, not using wikis is simply bad business. It’s a waste of human capital.
The transfer of the workplace from the desktop to the cloud also has the potential to be extremely cost effective. If all you need is a browser then the requirement for high spec laptops and maintenance departments is going to vanish. If your laptop breaks it doesn’t matter. You just get another one. No data lost, no backup issues, no downtime.
There is about to be a revolution. It will have as big an impact on business as the introduction of computers themselves had.
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