Articles Index: Technology Watch
In September, Adobe Systems, Inc. shook up more than one marketplace when it announced its acquisition of web analytics vendor Omniture, Inc.
I don't know of a single major enterprise that isn't experimenting with social computing behind the firewall. Every one of those organizations is also surely trying to figure out the best way to obtain business value at a time when "Enterprise 2.0 best practices" seem very circumstantial. I'll propose a simple way to look at the challenge: The things you need to do for successful social computing within the enterprise are the exact same things you need to do to build an effective intranet (and vice versa).
Can social software consistently bring real ROI?
In a January memorandum titled "Transparency and Open Government" (http://tinyurl.com/openg), President Barack Obama called for greater transparency in making information available online as well as more citizen participation in federal websites. Experience from the private sector suggests that executing on a strategy of greater transparency combined with public participation will be difficult. Technology vendors talk a good game about offering a unified solution to this challenge, but their architectures have not caught up with their marketing here.
The cloud seems to be manna to most analysts, investors, and vendors these days. As my colleague Alan Pelz-Sharpe writes, "It's a great term, ‘Cloud Computing,' since it conjures up visions of an invisible internet—an ether-like zone in the sky where computing power and storage is unfettered by the petty restrictions of boxes, cables, and technicians. Cloud computing sounds fluffy, it sounds cool, it sounds limitless, it sounds like the future."
Column/Technology Watch - Posted 13 Apr 2009
Blogging has always been controversial, but the newest critique argues that you should pursue a leaner, sexier alternative: "microblogging." Microblogging can take many forms on the public internet or within the firewall. You can microblog most famously via Twitter "Tweets," Facebook status messages, or various other similar services.
A significant segment of the enterprise social software landscape has gone comparatively under-reported: white label community services. These commercial offerings allow companies to use their platforms to create branded online communities. They employ a mixture of social applications—discussion, blogs, podcasting, profiles, tagging, rating, and so on—to get customers, partners, and employees interacting.
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