Social Networking & Collaboration

A ndrew McAfee coined the term “Enterprise 2.0” in 2006, using it to describe how organizations could apply Web 2.0 technologies in their intranet and extranets.1 Enterprise 2.0 digital platforms focus on knowledge workers’ practices and output, offering components, such as search queries, that make it easier for them to discover information and create links between information items. Such platforms also help knowledge workers publish content, organize information with tags and annotations, and apply recommendation and notification services. In the five years since McAfee coined the term, Enterprise 2.0 has evolved to include the use of social software, such as wikis, blogs, and prediction markets, to better engage employees, customers, and trading partners and make companies more creative, agile, and productive. For example, in some companies, human resources departments have coupled their management systems with external networking sites such as LinkedIn Recruiter and with social-media-based sites, such as Twitjobsearch, to find qualified candidates and better advertise job postings. However, social software greatly increases the volume of actionable information within organizations, which in turn increases the challenge of tracking and searching through such information. Fortunately, new technological approaches have emerged that could further boost the business impact of Enterprise 2.0. In particular, semantic and linked-data technologies can leverage the wealth of internal information and couple it with external information to make it actionable.2 Here, we introduce these technologies and describe how we’ve integrated them into a content management system to enhance Enterprise 2.0 platforms.