Richard Filing

From McKinsey
Technology alone is rarely the key to unlocking economic value: companies create real wealth when they combine technology with new ways of doing business. Through our work and research, we have identified eight technology-enabled trends that will help shape businesses and the economy in coming years. These trends fall within three broad areas of business activity: managing relationships, managing capital and assets, and leveraging information in new ways.
1. Distributing cocreation
2. Using consumers as innovators
3. Tapping into a world of talent
4. Extracting more value from interactions
5. Expanding the frontiers of automation
6. Unbundling production from delivery
7. Putting more science into management
8. Making businesses from information
 

Looks like a plan …
1. Make governance an enabler. The reason why most large organizations are slow to adopt Enterprise 2.0 tools is that senior executives are uncertain about the implications, and as a result cautious or worse. Governance needs to be in place to allay those fears, without stifling the emergent, participative nature of how the new tools create value for organizations.

2. Start from business applications, not tools. Far too often people want to implement blogs, wikis, tagging, or other tools. This is completely the wrong way around. The starting point has to be a specific business application, such as project management, product development, sales support or any number of functions that relate directly to business value.

3. Make work easier. None of the rhetoric or practice around Enterprise 2.0 makes any sense unless it makes the everyday work of employees easier, more effective, and more productive. If that is the principle around how all initiatives happen, things will necessarily be on the right track.

4. Build strategies at the architecture level. As described in more detail in my Successful Enterprise 2.0 and social media speech, a core issue is gathering inputs such that they contribute to valuable emergent outcomes. Any enterprise strategy has to be at this level, not at the level of implementing tools.

5. Allow users to experiment. This principle is often overlooked, yet Enterprise 2.0 is founded on end-users being able to adapt the tools, processes, and working to something that suits them. Everything must be changeable by users so the end result of how tools are used is unpredictable.

6. Create pilots that yield useful lessons. Understanding that no organization has got Enterprise 2.0 “right” yet, and that every organization is different, the task becomes one of trying things, seeing what works and what doesn’t, and evolving systems so that they create value. Designing projects to learn useful lessons and acting on these lessons is at the heart of this.

Trends in the Living Networks Blog

From Steve Eisner’s The Social Life blog (ageing unfortunately):
Except: There are two remaining solutions to the tag mess, assuming you’re sticking with standard methods of tag browsing: 1) re-tagging content later based on observed usage, and 2) tag equivalence (or at least tag migration.) #1 isn’t going to happen, so let’s focus on the more practical #2. What this means is that users can tag items with some original term, but if another term becomes more popular, the first term can somehow be declared equivalent to the new term, so searchers will find the intended content. Whether automatically applied or added manually, this equivalence can greatly increase the network benefit of a bookmarking application. 
Read the full post here