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Visualization: Social bookmarking in the enterprise

Ross Dawson, March 31, 2009 12:07 AM US PT

In our Implementing Enterprise 2.0 report, we created visual representations to help explain how the most important social media tools can be applied inside organizations.

The diagram below was used in the chapter on social bookmarking, which was designed to accompany the detailed coverage in the report, but it is hopefully fairly self-explanatory!

Go to the Implementing Enterprise 2.0 downloads page for several free chapters, including the chapter on social networking on the enterprise, with its own diagram on how social networks relate to other Enterprise 2.0 tools.

Please let me know your thoughts and feedback on improving these diagrams for future versions of the report. I'll post more of these visualizations on this blog in coming weeks.

4 Comments

Thomas Crampton said:

But what tool do you use for this? In my experience Delicious is not easy for selective sharing - or am I missing some functionality?

April 3, 2009 12:24 AM

Ross Dawson said:

Hi Thomas, this diagram represents enterprise social bookmarking, so it refers to the functionality and applications you should be looking for behind the firewall. As we point out in the chapter on social bookmarking in the enterprise, tiered access permissioning is one of the key features you should look for in enterprise-grade social bookmarking.

IBM's Dogear (now part of the Lotus Connections suite) is a very mature social bookmarking system, and each release of Sharepoint has improved social bookmarking and tagging functionality. Connectbeam is a stand-alone enterprise social bookmarking platform. The major Enterprise Content Management vendors are just getting to introduce this into their offerings, but it's in all cases firmly on their release agenda.

Social bookmarking, if it includes enterprise functionality and (the harder part) gets good uptake across the organization, can be extremely valuable in improving information access.

That's what I reckon anyway :-)

April 3, 2009 1:05 AM

Thomas Crampton said:

Um, I beg to differ on trying to build usage within a company.

1- I am personally overwhelmed by new services.

I was frustrated by Delicious and the inability to easily share private bookmarks, so I checked out Diigo. Very nice service, but I don't use it because I don't want yet another social media tool.

2- In addition (And I don't mean to dump on an entire industry, but) enterprise software solutions that I have experienced are generally hell.

That said, it sounds like you have much more experience in dealing with creating enterprise solutions!

April 3, 2009 5:36 AM

Ross Dawson said:

Absolutely.

Your comments reflect just about everyone's views Thomas, and since you're a sophisticated user, that's compounded manifold in any large organization.

As I said in passing in my comment, user adoption is the (very) hard bit.

One implication is that integrated software suites are better, so people are just learning facets of one tool as and when it is useful to them, rather than lots of new ones.

Yes, the history of enterprise software usability is atrocious. But one of the great benefits of the current generation is that the lessons of the consumer web are (sometimes) being brought to bear in making things a lot easier to use.

But yes it's a lot easier to talk about than do :-)

April 3, 2009 1:23 PM

Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur, keynote speaker, strategy advisor, and bestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of four companies: professional services and venture firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy consulting group Future Exploration Network, leading events firm The Insight Exchange, and influence ratings start-up Repyoot.

Ross is author most recently of Implementing Enterprise 2.0, the prescient Living Networks, which anticipated the social network revolution, and the Amazon.com bestseller Developing Knowledge-Based Client Relationships (click on the links for free chapter downloads). He is based in Sydney and San Francisco with his wife jewellery designer Victoria Buckley and two beautiful young daughters.