Social Business - The CIO's Guide to Oracle Products and Solutions - page 113

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Social Busin ess
The world is a changed place. The collaborative web has caught our collec-
tive imagination, and there is no turning back, particularly in the business
world. Some have taken to calling this use of collaborative technologies
in business Enterprise 2 (E 2.0). Wikipedia may have been the first com-
pany to popularize the phenomenon of user-generated knowledge, but
this encyclopedia is just the tip of the iceberg. Companies far and wide
are wiki-izing. Nokia hosts a number of wikis, some of which are used
internally to coordinate technology research. Dresdner Kleinwort, an
investment bank, operates the largest corporate wiki. About 50 percent of
Dresdner staff use this wiki to make sure that all team members are on the
same project-management page.
E 2.0 is more than just wikis, of course. It constitutes the entirety of
social networking applications, which includes blogs, discussion boards,
workspaces, and anything else that is sharable or even combinable (e.g.,
mash-ups). IBM uses E 2.0 for everything from collaborative document
production to internal project collaboration. Nokia uses it for all-purpose
teamware. A whole host of companies use it for knowledge management.
Honeywell was one of the first to use E 2.0 to perform knowledge discov-
ery, research, and sharing across miles, regardless of whether users even
know each other. It would appear, then, that E 2.0 using social network-
ing technologies has wide applicability to all things business—including
software engineering.
Given this hot trend, it's reasonable to expect Oracle to have quickly
jumped on the social networking bandwagon, so much so that one of the
five major categories listed under CIO Solutions in Oracle's C-Central
CIO forum is “social business.”
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