Ross Mayfield and Kim Polese push Enterprise 2.0

Don Tapscott’s presentation at Enterprise 2.0 was followed by rapid fire presentations by Ross Mayfield, CEO of Socialtext, Kim Polese, CEO of SpikeSource along with Joe Schueller, Innovation Manager of Procter & Gamble Global Business Services.

Ross Mayfield:

Complexity is in th social network. Vendors tried to put it in the software. Social Software keeps complexity in the social network, where it belongs, by only encoding simple rules.

Mayfield sees a power law of participation applied to social software: all people may engage in the basic tasks of reading, favoriting, tagging and commenting, but very few will climb the curve of participation to write, refactor, collaborate, moderate or lead.

By opening our systems to participation, people will find their appropriate level of participation.

So, what to Wiki? First, effective collaboration requires a goal.

Apply it to small group communication. Create a living Intranet. See what happens when people have access to the edit button.

A good place to start might be the creation of a global glossary, FAQs, How-tos to capture the language, practices and wisdom of the people who “do” within your organization.

Apply the Wiki approach to Processes. Think about a help desk. Their task is exception handling. A Wiki is a great means to capture both the experience and the wisdom in identifying and handling these exceptions. If the entire company contributes answers, the full expertise of the company will generate solutions.

Kim Polese

Gartner suggests that collaboration technologies will be widely adopted within five years.

Enterprises do not want point solutions. They want integrated or Suite solutions.SpikeSource has developed a product called SuiteTwo, which integrates a stack of social software into one Enterprise 2.0 solution.