Jerry Bowles has started a great new blog that is certainly worth checking out.

It’s called Enterprise Web 2.0.

Jerry has a great article entitled: Top 10 Management Fears About Enterprise Web 2.0.

Here’s the list and my comments on each question:

Enterprise Web 2.0 Technological Barriers

1. How can I be certain that the information that is gathered and shared behind the firewall stays behind the firewall?

Blogging is part of the communication continuum - Instant Messaging, Email and Blogs. Your employees currently follow a policy to keep some information only “behind the firewall” when using IM and Email. They will need to follow the same rules when it comes to using and sharing information they find with your Enterprise Web 2.0 tools.

2. How do I control who has access to particular levels of information and databases?

Set up a simple 3 layer system. Everyone, Department Only, Project Team. For specific project blogs, set a default access level, and then make exceptions on an article by article basis.

Enterprise blogging tools like WordPress MU can dynamically re-draw pages depending on the viewers access control.

Setting up the read access lists is also fairly easy. The user experience looks like addressing an email.

3. How do I protect the integrity of the information from malicious tampering by disgruntled employees or managers?

You use the wisdom of the crowd combined with audit trails and roll-back features. For example, say you are using Social Text as an enterprise Wiki to document policies and procedures. If an angry employee changed one of the policies, Social Text would keep track of who changed it, what changes they made and when. The group (aka the wise crowd) would be relied upon to catch the error. The employee could then be held accountable for their actions.

It should be noted that most companies have this problem today, but it is actually much more serious. There is no access control over most policy and procedure documents. The docs just sit there on a shared drive, available for hundreds of people to anonymously edit.

And, in today’s environment, there is an even greater risk: without the enhanced search and cross-linking features of blogs and wikis, most employees have trouble getting the information they need when they need it. The result is a high chance for mistakes because people are not familiar with the policies.

4. How can I be sure that information is being “tagged” properly for efficient retrieval later?

Social tagging works.

Just as the government does not have to enforce a proper price for beer or any other good or service in an open market economy, the knowledge management department does not have to enforce a rigid standard for how things are tagged. People will tag things as they want, and eventually, cultural standards will arrive. See Stu Downes Folksonomy in the enterprise for more proof.

Also, remember that things are not tagged on the open Internet, at least not according to any centrally planned taxonomy, and yet you can still find exactly what you are looking for. You use Google.

After you deploy your Enterprise Web 2.0 solutions, if you are still having trouble finding what you need, buy a Google Mini. The Google Mini doesn’t work all that well in Web 1.0 Intranets, but with all the additional cross-linking that will automatically happen in enterprise blogs and wikis, Google Mini should work just fine.

5. What kind of training do employees need before they can effectively use the technology?

Some employees will need no training. Generally, these will be younger employees and the 5 to 10% who already have a personal blog.

Other employees will need fairly extensive training.

Enterprise Web 2.0 Cultural Barriers

6. How can I monitor the system to make certain that what individuals are saying and sharing reflects company policy?

This is less of an issue if you are dealing with Internal only deployments of Enterprise Web 2.0.

Today, you have to deal with this issue when if comes to emails, voicemails, phone calls, instant messages, etc.

The one advantage to Web 2.0 is that if someone puts up something offensive in a Blog, you can take it down. Once an email is sent, if can be forwarded on to millions.

7. What are the legal dangers in saving and sharing so much loosely supervised input?

In some instances, there are serious legal dangers. In a consulting firm, if you promise the client to only share client information with the project team, that information better not be shared with the whole firm.

The best way to address this issue, is to develop a one-page set of rules for employees. Simple guidelines on what they should and what they should not post. The guidelines should be blunt, easy to read, and feel almost like Enterprise Web 2.0 commandments.

Thou shall not flame thy colleagues.

If the legal department helps with crafting the guidelines, along with input from HR, you should be able to minimize the implications of this risk. Note also, that this is a danger in today’s environment. Except you have little to no ability to see who read what on the company’s shared drive. The result is no accountability in today’s systems.

8. How do I distinguish “productive” use of the technology from horsing around?

How do you distinguish between productive use of email and horsing around? Or even worse, how do you distinguish between productive use of email, and CC’ing to CYA internal spam where co-workers fill each other’s inboxes with stuff they only ends up wasting time. “Just in case you might need to know about this in six months, let me re-cap today’s meeting”. That stuff can now be put on the blog or into the wiki, and found when it is needed.

9. How do I “manage” the gathering and disseminating of so much unstructured information?

This is like the tagging issue. There are tools out there, such as RSS that help.

However, I also believe that it is important, in the enterprise setting, to impose a little structure. Instead of having blogs, for example, have purpose specific blogs:

• People Work Sites can be a combo of resumes, current projects, contact info and personal blog
• Project Work Sites can list the client, include to-do lists, related docs, include updates, and have links to the people working on the project.

The right list of Work Site types (or purpose specific enterprise blogs) depends on the company, and like everything else, will probably evolve over time.

10. How do I know if I’m getting my money’s worth out of the investment in technology?

What investment? This stuff is so cheap, you will hardly be able to notice the expense.

With customizations, hardware costs, integration costs and deployment costs, you are looking at less that $50,000 for an enterprise blogging system for thousands of users.

Conclusion

In the end, the adoption of Enterprise Web 2.0 technology is an issue of both risk and reward. Risk management is about balancing the risks with the business benefits.

Enterprise IT is slowing the adoption of Web 2.0 because they are only familiar with the risk side of the equation. Isolated from the profit centers, enterprise IT only thinks about how things could go wrong, and then comes up with the logical answer of NO.

That, however, is not a logical business decision from the perspective of the CEO.

Enterprise Web 2.0 technology will flatten the organization’s management structure, highlight good ideas, create an environment that is more of a meritocracy, make a company more nimble and more customer focuses and most importantly increase the pace of innovation. In the face of these business benefits, the risks are minor.

CTOs, CIOs and CKOs who fail to see the big picture will loose all control of their end users as their employees turn to open Internet solutions, such as Sales Force, instead of waiting for a sanctioned behind-the-fire-wall solution.

For enterprise IT, Web 2.0 really does force the issue: Get It, or Get Out of The Way.