Enterprise 2.0
Knowledge Management in the enterprise has become more important than at any time in the past. More are more employees are becoming “knowledge workers” that must handle non-routine situations, while millions of employees will be leaving the workplace over the coming decade, taking their knowledge and expertise about their jobs with them.
Traditional knowledge management tools have been only partially effective, in large part because it has been difficult to encourage employees to contribute their knowledge for the good of the enterprise. According to usability guru Jacob Nielsen, the majority of content in an online community is generated by just 1% of users.
Fortunately, enterprises are now able to benefit from the explosion of new "social media" technologies in the consumer sector. Individuals are participating in social media at ever increasing rates, in large part because these new technologies have made it not only effortless, but enjoyable to contribute. The application of social media and Web 2.0 to the enterprise even has its own name: Enterprise 2.0.
Enterprise 2.0: Eluma for the Enterprise
Eluma leverages the latest technologies to deliver a product that is ideal for improving employee productivity, as well as for enhancing knowledge management and collaboration within the enterprise:
- Eluma enables employees to easily collect and organize all online information around any topics of interest. Web links, RSS feeds, podcasts, etc. can all be effortlessly organized around any topics, and annotated with the users’ comments, making it simple to amass information on a research project, or to stay up-to-date on information relevant to their work.
- Eluma supports organizing information according to taxonomies as well as via tagging, so that enterprises can organize information according to a folksonomy in addition to the more classical, taxonomy-based approaches. Folksonomies can make it much simpler to categorize information on-the-fly, and for others to find it without knowing exactly where it resides.
- Eluma allows information to be delivered directly to employees’ desktops, as “desktop alerts,” so that critical information is less likely to be overlooked, as it often is when delivered via email or notices on a company intranet.
- Eluma’s social bookmarking capabilities enable employees to share any collections of content that they choose with another employee, with a group of employees, or with the entire organization.
- Eluma shifts the emphasis from contributing for the benefit of the enterprise to organizing for the benefit of the self. As a result, Eluma gets used and populated more often than traditional knowledge management tools.
- The Eluma application can be skinned by the enterprise, so that it appears as the organizations’ own product. In addition, the organization can pre-populate Eluma with specific content for its various divisions, so that each group sees the content that is relevant for them.
“We use Eluma in our organization to disseminate specific information to our various divisions, and we use the desktop alerts feature to make sure time-sensitive or important information does not get ignored.
In addition, we’re finding that Eluma is unique among knowledge management tools because it encourages employees to organize content to help them be more productive in their own work. It’s then easy for them to subsequently share relevant collections of content with specific co-workers, departments, or with the entire organization. This is much more effective than previous tools that were dependent on employees contributing knowledge for the good of the organization.”
- Bob Andrews, CFO, Mirror Image Internet.
More information on Eluma and Enterprise 2.0 can be found here: