Web 2.0 Seduces the Enterprise (continued)
Take RSS, for example. Often mistaken for another form of social software, RSS is actually an increasingly popular marketing tool. Companies can publish very specific information about new products, bug fixes and special promotions, and make it easily accessible to customers via RSS.
"Bringing the publish-and-subscribe paradigm of RSS into the enterprise has been one of the biggest hurdles," Young says, in large part because IT departments are concerned with the technology's security. RSS capabilities built into Internet Explorer 7 and Outlook, for example, don't provide the kind of security that can be built into a dedicated feed reader. "There's the potential that you'll be opening yourself to viruses and spyware," says Young, but quickly adds that this security concern is, right now, more theoretical than real.
Putting Web 2.0 To Use
Much of the above explains why Enterprise 2.0 is a lot like sex: everyone talks about it, most people think that others are doing it more, but in fact it's very difficult to know what's really going on inside the firewalls. Only a few major corporations have wholeheartedly embraced Enterprise 2.0 tools: McDonald's and Northwestern Mutual each have built new Intranets upon platforms centered on customizable home pages, social networking capabilities, wikis, blogs, RSS and other Web 2.0 tools, but in most organizations, the tools are often being used in small groups or divisions. Dell's support team has adopted wikis as a key tool for sharing solutions to customer problems, but it's unclear how often other segments of Dell use wikis. (article continues)
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