Web 2.0 Knowledge Technologies and the Enterprise. Smarter, Lighter and Cheaper

269 Pages·2010·3.79 MB·English

by  Paul Jackson (Auth.)

Web 2.0 Knowledge Technologies
and the Enterprise:
Smarter, lighter and cheaper
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Web 2.0 Knowledge
Technologies and
the Enterprise:
Smarter, lighter and cheaper
P J
AUL ACKSON
Chandos Publishing
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First published in 2010
ISBN:
978 1 84334 537 4
© P.Jackson,2010
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Preface
I didn’t write this book on a mobile phone using an Internet wiki on a
high-speed train from Tokyo to Nagano. Wags may well say that is
obvious. Nonetheless, I got a lot of help. I would particularly like to
thank Professor Jane Klobas and Dr Stuart Garner for the many
discussions and reviews. I would also like to thank the organisations
who opened their doors to me to look at their wikis and blogs, tags and
feeds. And, of course, Christine, Tommy and Danny. The title of the
book came to me in the year of the Beijing Olympics, the motto of the
modern Olympics being of course Citius, Altius, Fortius – swifter, higher,
stronger. The Web 2.0 tools I had been working with in organisations
seemed cheaper, faster and lighter than anything I had experienced and
yet were too often transformed by the dead hand of corporate tradition.
So I wanted to write something that helped to realise what I saw as
enormous potential. Being a social scientist as well as a computer
scientist I could tell that the problems were not technological. What were
missing were social and conceptual elements, ways to frame the potential
applications and understand the blockages. I hope this book goes a little
way towards helping resolve this.
Paul Jackson
School of Management
Edith Cowan University
Australia
ix
List of figures and tables
Figures
2.1 Meme map – the gravitational core 13
2.2 The NightJack blog (now unavailable) 15
2.3 Robert Scoble’s blog 16
2.4 The student website which collects and rates questions
for Angela Merkel 19
2.5 The first Internet website 21
2.6 A simple HTML page 21
2.7 A simple wiki page using Mediawiki freeware 23
2.8 Marking up pages using a category page hierarchy in
Mediawiki 24
2.9 The Tax Almanac wiki 25
2.10 Referring readers to social tagging sites in
The Australian newspaper 31
2.11 Referring readers to social tagging and blogging sites
in Die Bildzeitung newspaper 32
2.12 The tag cloud on the Blogscope.com website 33
2.13 The Special Interest Group function of social
networking site Ning 37
2.14 The Unflence mashup of political influence on US politics 45
2.15 Use of Web 2.0 facilities by US newspapers 49
2.16 Combining Web 2.0 components to create a work system 50
2.17 Sharing using Web 2.0 facilities 51
xi
Web 2.0 Knowledge Technologies and the Enterprise
3.1 US labour force participation by age 66
3.2 Network effects and their impact on resource access 69
3.3 The Patientslikeme portal 73
3.4 The Atizo innovation site showing ideas for
next-generation BMW motorbikes 84
3.5 The fragmentation of value chains and outsourcing 86
3.6 Enterprise networks arising from work fragmentation 87
4.1 The topology of a ‘Britannica’ encyclopaedia space 100
4.2 Pfizerpedia main page – an encyclopaedia space 103
4.3 The Microsoft blog portal – a customer space 128
4.4 The relationship between spaces, flows, information,
function and social institutions 130
4.5 A project space containing sub-spaces 133
5.1 Taxonomy of knowledge types in organisational memory 143
5.2 The Mediawiki extensions list showing ‘Who Is Watching’
extension 152
5.3 A project category tree (semantic web) 153
6.1 The social systems supporting Web 2.0 tool use 156
6.2 Organisational memory and organisational learning
procedures 159
6.3 Knowledge processes and Web 2.0 tools 162
6.4 Transactive memory systems and Web 2.0 tools 165
6.5 Transactive memory in organisations 166
6.6 The knowledge transformation processes in social
constructivism 169
6.7 Institutional theory and contributing to Web 2.0 tools 175
6.8 Decision quadrant – Web 2.0 adoption 176
6.9 Power and control and Web 2.0 adoption 187
6.10 Social identity and Web 2.0 adoption 192
6.11 Theories which help explain Web 2.0 social software 194
xii
List of figures and tables
Tables
5.1 From flow to function, knowledge type to location 151
5.2 Flows and tags 153
7.1 Developing a business case 202–3
7.2 Matching knowledge types to spaces 205–6
7.3 Defining the knowledge transformation processes
within spaces 207–8
7.4 Identity flows and functions, knowledge type and
storage 209
7.5 Analysing groups as potential adopters of Web 2.0 221–2
xiii
About the author
Paul Jacksonis an information and knowledge management specialist who
has been a systems developer, product development manager, strategic
consultant and academic during an international career spanning 25 years.
Paul has spent his working life in Germany and Australia, working for PSI
AG and IBM, and as an independent consultant. He is now a Research
Scholar at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia. He has been a
consultant to many commercial and government organisations and
managed multi-million dollar information systems projects. He has a PhD
in information systems development and has published widely on
organisational information and knowledge management in highly ranked
journals, books and conferences.
Using theories of knowledge from his studies in philosophy, group
psychology and the sociology of knowledge, in this book he builds on his
practical experience to articulate alternative approaches to making a
success of Web 2.0 knowledge tools in business and government
organisations. While Web 2.0 strategists focus upon the exciting potential
outcomes and technologists describe the necessary skills and functions, this
book emphasises the need for knowledge workers and managers to
conceptualise Web 2.0 as supplying an empty field upon which they
inscribe specific kinds of spaces. Each space implies a context, or frame,
for enacting flows of particular types of information, constrained by the
emergence of appropriate institutions and rules which match the nature of
the space. It is hoped that this notion will provide a basis for knowledge
workers to autonomously develop and maintain their Web 2.0
applications and satisfy the needs of management for discipline and
relevance.
The author may be contacted via the publishers.
xv
1
Introduction
An irregular heartbeat is a common consequence of heart attacks and can
be fatal. In the 1980s a drug called encainidewas routinely used to reduce
this risk by suppressing such arrhythmia. It was logical to assume that
since this drug induced a regular heart rhythm, it automatically reduced
the chance of a further heart attack: in fact the opposite was true and the
drug was responsible for a significant number of deaths and did not even
improve the health of those who lived. This only came to light when
evidence was collected in randomised clinical trials. Similarly, although
there is convincing logic that it must work, the common orthopaedic
process of arthroscopic cleansing of arthritic knees by washing out the
joint with fluid has also been found through clinical trials to have no
impact whatsoever. Both are cases where the intervention seemed
‘common sense’ and so the treatments were taken as the received wisdom.
Both applied simple logic to a limited set of premises within a biological
framework and came to compelling but wrong conclusions, conclusions
that were only belatedly tested because of their apparent obviousness.
Common sense and logic tell us that the technologies known as ‘Web
2.0’ are destined for success in the corporate environment. McKinsey go so
far as to say that Web 2.0 tools may exceed enterprise resource planning,
customer relationship management and supply chain management systems
in improving productivity through greater participation and
collaboration.1 They are a simple, fast, effective, cheap and useful
treatment for several ailments afflicting corporations. They also appear to
be the right tools to manage the increasingly fragmented, global
information workplace of networked, virtual enterprises. But although
there are case studies of successful implementations, generally published by
vendors and consulting firms, there is still relatively little independent
review or measurement of improvement. And more fundamentally, how
are we to conceptualise ‘success’? We need to ask ourselves whether the
perspectives we are using to measure success actually cope with or reveal
1