Enterprise 2.0… It Just Feels Right
by Joe McKendrick
Enterprise and Web 2.0 has many ramifications for the way we conduct our work, how value is created and delivered in the organization, and we can debate endlessly about at what point that value will be delivered.
But perhaps the benefits of E/W 2.0 need not be so overstated and complicated. To put it simply, it helps people work together more comfortably.
That’s the message heard at a recent Web 2.0 discussion hosted by ZDNet at San Francisco’s Churchill Club.
Douglass Merrill, vice president of engineering at Google, said its’ difficult, and perhaps not the right time, to attempt to measure the monetization of Web 2.0. “Measuring in terms of big dollars might be the wrong metric. For example, 100,000 companies use Google apps and don’t pay for it.”
Randall Spratt, CIO of McKesson, said that about 1,000 McKesson employees are behind the 1-800-ASK-A-NURSE service, and all work out of their homes, supported by IT and interconnected data centers. “The biggest issue with nurses leaving a hospital and working at home is they lose the social interaction, and lose the connection with their peers, and the ability to talk about their profession.” Spratt added that McKesson found that “by investing in collaboration technologies, whether it’s instant messages or local wikis, we’ve dramatically improved the job satisfaction of work-at-home employees.”
Web 2.0 approaches have also had a direct impact on the bottom line, Spratt added. “At the executive level, for the first time, we’re starting to see real options arrive at an executive collaboration level — telepresence rooms, high-def multi-screens…”
Doug Schwinn, CIO of Hasbro, observed that his companies has project teams that deliver modules all over the world. “They collaborate together — we use instant messaging, we use blogs, instant messaging, and we’re starting to use wikis. It all adds to our ability to delivery a high-quality product in a shorter period of time.”
