Readiness?

It seems pretty obvious that large organisations, globally dispersed, will have a tremendous amount of latent energy that may be tapped by embracing and deploying collaborative, largely web based, technologies.

Indeed, this is at the heart of the information revolution that has been upon us since the uptake of the web. Ideas, thoughts, opinions, facts from all corners of the globe are only a series of clicks away.

Looking at an organisation that has a deep investment in legacy systems, various silos of information, some web based, some not, it’s all too easy to take a technically driven approach to facilitating greater collaboration, knowledge sharing and interaction across the global enterprise.

We need wikis… we need blogs… we need social networks… we need better search … we need collaborative filtering… personalisation … and so on.

For me personally, I would ask the question… all of the above is available, free of charge, in shedloads to anyone with an internet connection…. to what extent are the employees and partners of an organisation already involved in and using knowledge sharing tools? If so, how can it be done better if the organisation is to provide it’s own in-house knowledge sharing platforms? If not, what can we reasonable expect to achieve. How ready is the enterprise to really begin using these technologies in a way that results in new creations, new collaborations, new strategic directions?

What needs to be done to facilitate the right level of readiness so that the introduction of tools and technologies will actually be fruitfull?

Is our wonderful document respository, web based and tightly integrated to desktop applications going to be little more than a glorified file share?