All That Data

None of my clients were exhibiting in the demo area of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, so when the demo floor was open, I had the opportunity to stroll through the aisles and talk to various vendors instead of manning a booth and explaining a particular product or technology to passersby.

The Enterprise 2.0 movement—applying Web 2.0 technology to problems and processes within the enterprise—promises to transform the online experience of workers in companies large and small. Instead of being deluged with email and interrupted by IM, workers can access company news and information in RSS feeds when it's convenient. Instead of emailing Word documents to everyone on a team and trying to coordinate all the changes and comments, authors can jointly edit documents with tools like Google docs. The table below summarizes some of these changes:

Category	Web 1.0	Enterprise 2.0	Benefits from New Approach
Knowledge sharing	Email and irregular postings on portals	Wikis and blog posts	Publishes data in a more permanent format Makes information easier to discover Reaches stake-holders outside one's immediate group Enables non-technical users to post information without requiring custom clients or help from IT
Notification of changes and news	Email and phone calls	RSS	Occurs automatically when blogs or wikis are updated Reaches all interested parties, even those the author might not know about

(For more about this new way of working, and some thoughts on the pros and cons of email in particular, see this recent post by Harvard Business School's Andrew McAfee.)

Clearly, these platforms and portals are going to store a lot of data. How do we make it searchable? How we enable a product manager for a new leather cleaner product to find the blog post from three months ago that discussed product requirements for a similar product being developed by a partner in Switzerland.

One solution is to apply tags—meta-data keywords that summarize the content of a blog post, Web page, or some other piece of content. For example, the tags for that product requirement blog post might be "leather cleaner, research, product requirements, survey, partner, Switzerland."

Thomas Vander Wal is a consultant who has spent a great deal of time thinking about tagging and classifying data. He coined the term folksonomy to distinguish a bottom-up approach to classifying data, in which users apply the tags they think are relevant, from more traditional top-down approaches that rely on formal vocabularies and specialists in information taxonomy.

Getting users in the habit of tagging content and tagging it usefully can be a bit of a challenge, however. As Vander Wal pointed out in his presentation at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, you can end up with problems like users not tagging content at all or using tags that are so general they prove useless in future searches. He gave the example of a company promising to reward workers who tagged documents, then discovering that workers were meeting this requirement by applying tags like "document." More tags are better than fewer, and overall, however they are applied, tags must serve the purpose of distinguishing one document for another.

The creators of software tools have a role to play here. They can create applications that prompt users to tag data. Some applications might even analyze data as it's being entered and propose tags for it.

Shortly after Vander Wal's talk, I found myself strolling through the demo area, wondering how the many social collaboration programs on display handled this important issue.

At the Microsoft booth, I heard from someone demoing SharePoint that customers simply don't use tagging all that much. The idea of tagging, in this person's opinion, was not turning out to be a success.

At the ThoughtFarmer booth, I met Darren Gibbons, the co-creator of the ThoughtFarmer intranet solution, and the president of OpenRoad Communications. I asked Darren what he thought about tagging. Should be automated? Left to individuals? How could it be made to work?

Here's a video with his answer, which is that tagging works best when it benefits both the tagger and the community overall.



On the next aisle, I got talking to Padmanabh Dabke, the founder and CTO of a company called SpigIt, about the challenge of creating meaningful tags on a large scale. SpigIt makes software that enables companies to collect from large communities of employees and customers, then rank the ideas to decide which ones should be pursued. In addition to offering guidance for investment, the software helps managers identify which employees and customers are consistently coming up with the best ideas.

Nabh pointed out that some older technology—namely, expert systems—could be applied to sort through the torrent of data in online communities and aid in speedy classification. (Pardon my shaky camera work in the first few moments of our conversation.)



Any conclusions? Yes. It's clear that companies are replacing or upgrading their old Web 1.0 intranets with these new, easier-to-use community platforms. Workers are getting used to blogging and using tools like Wikis and RSS feeds. Tagging will make all these tools more useful, and the best practices for tagging will probably combine user habits, helpful user interfaces, and powerful processing engines like that described by Nabh.