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Oracle, where 2 becomes 1?

Oracle have published a new study  “Enterprise 2.0: Driving creativity, productivity and collaboration” based on interviews with 200 people. it shows that £900M a week is being wasted. It claims that this is made up from wasted time – time wasted searching for content, copying and pasting content and using e-mail as a storage tool. Of note, 96% were open to new technologues.

It is peppered with quotes from well known UK 2.0 people – Dave Terrar, Paul Millar, Scott Gavin and a few practitioners (those what do). It says all the right things. The study lists out some good case studies and best practice, even identifying 5 steps to successfull rollout

  1. Determine what the business wants to achieve
  2. Lead by example – identify evangelists to drive the utilisation of new tools
  3. Choose projects to allow employees to trial use of the new tools
  4. Enable search and mobile networking
  5. Remove redundant tools

Of note, 2 of these I’ve seen questioned of late – choose the evangelists where the business process matters most, not by those most enthusiastic and ignore redundant tools (both by Dion Hinchcilffe I believe).

There’s a twist in the tail in this report though. Perhaps not surprisingly, Oracle being Oracle, they seem to see a solution in centralised knowledge management

“Oracle says that one of the reasons for this wasted time is the amount of applications people are using at work – the average employee uses over five different applications at work on a weekly basis. This lack of a centralised system for storing, accessing and managing documents means workers have to spend time copying and pasting the same information between documents stored in different places.”
Steve Evans

This is spelled out even more clearly in the report itself:

“Central to an organisation’s use of Enterprise 2.0 tools is the ability to keep knowledge within the organisation, no matter where employees go. By integrating all the communications from Enterprise 2.0 tools back into enterprise systems, everything is captured. This means that knowledge isn’t lost, but also that more meaningful conversations can be had with customers and suppliers.”

There’s something slightly discomforting and contradictory here – or shall I say I detect a worry from Oracle’s part. E 2.0 loosens up working practices and in and productive ways. For Oracle at the final stage, the aim is to control, to keep all conversations within the business, where everything is captured.

That to me sounds rather like the 1.0 model of knowledge management….Or am I just being churlish here? We need data, we need ubiquitous data and ubiquitous access. But do we need the central command and control model suggested here?

Update: Oracle Answers my questions – they are 2.0…

Refs

Oracle Research Reveals Workplace Technology is Hindering Business Productivity and Collaboration

UK businesses and workers split on Enterprise 2.0: study – Steve Evans

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