I read an interesting article from vawn himmelsbach in the latest issue of Computing Canada titled ‘Many companies not ready to embrace Web 2.0 concepts’ (strangely this article is not online as of this post).  This is completely true and another bell toll for what a lot of people think is going to be a major shakeup on a worldwide scale in how big enterprises do business.

I have spent a lot of time doing IT consulting work for large firms - in the last few years i have had extended engagements at a large credit card company, an investment bank, a consumer bank, an airline, and a multinational IT firm and there has been one common theme that i have experienced - the Subject Matter Expertise in each of these organizations has been completely compartmentalized.

At none of these firms was there any task force or technical centers of expertise that IT and any other type of employee really could turn to for advice, strategy, or other information. I think partially the reason for this is that in these large organizatons each expert resource protects his territory so to speak. I have always thought that this type of compartmentalization of expert knowledge and techniques completely defeats the purpose of being a member of a big corporation. If i was the CIO of one of these big firms - i would want to SUMMON THE COLLECTIVE EXPERT KNOWLEDGE OF MY RESOURCES - that’s collaboration - which is at the heart of web 2.0.
I am not saying that every employee should have a corporate blog - that is asking for the airing of dirty laundry as we have seen.

One web 2.0 tool that i would recommend to EVERY corporation is a wiki Why arent these big players HARVESTING procedures and technical knowledge on a collaborative wiki and setting up a role and authentication structure with their coporate LDAPs? Having a corporate knowledge base would have made my work and my teams work much much easier for all of the projects i have done in an enterprise organization. Just publicly managing project requirements in a wiki instead of passing around emailed documents would make project teams and general busness operations orders of magnitude more efficient. Take a look at a great australian company - atlassian who makes two excellent wiki tools - jira and confluence - for enterprises. They are fantastic tools that i have had success with and they are very affordable to boot.

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