Monday, November 27, 2006

Social tagging in the enterprise podtech video

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Puneet Gupta the CEO of Connectbeam pinged me today notifying me that the Scoble Show has finally posted his interview and demo video of the Connectbeam social tagging enterprise solution. Puneet and i have had several conversations since we met at the Office 2.0 conference. Since i am very interested in this space i am hoping that soon we can work on some client engagements together because i see social tagging as a way to enhance information sharing and delivery in the enterprise. If you are interested in how social tagging behind the firewall can potentially be addressed you should check out the videos.

Connectbeam is not the only enterprise social tagging application out there and the long awaited IBM dogear tool is expected to come out next year and i have heard of enterprises successfully using open source tools like scuttle
but from what i have seen and Puneet and i have discussed, i think they have a very good understanding of the Enterprise need- down to the fact that a tool like this needs to address the "what is in it for me" question that all enterprise applications struggle with as they get adopted

Our latest conversation was focused on sales users and the possibilities of an enterprise social tagging tool as a collaboration and knowledge capture system in the world of the Sales. Sure sharing is a bit weird (competitive pressures and paranoia) but when competing for the complex sale that may include an entire team within sales, marketing and product a collaboration tool like social tagging/bookmarking can easily show its worth. A couple months back i blogged about Account Planning in a Web 2.0 world- a simple use case for a complicated and what we all know as a tedious task that most sales teams do not enjoy doing.

One of those companies that has implemented social tagging behind the firewall is Mitre. I met Laurie Damianos at the Taxonomy Bootcamp last month where she and her colleague Donna Cuomo presented on a panel on "Social Tagging: Does It Work Inside the Firewall?". Back in May I had read Mitre's Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise white paper on a 6 month pilot and became immediately fascinated with the potential of social tagging in the enterprise. Laurie just recently sent me the updated version of this white paper
'Exploring the Adoption, Utility, and Social Influences of Social Bookmarking in a Corporate Environment'. The paper has been accepted for presentation at HICSS, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences in January 2007. The paper has not yet been published anywhere but will be available electronically through the conference proceedings in early January. Laurie was kind enough to share the results with me. i am not sure if i can blog about it so i will wait till it's published because their are some very interesting patterns and results that the Mitre organization found.

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