How to Use Web 2.0 Inside Your Company

Start Small and Simply

Goal: Identify a Web 2.0 service that will actually accomplish something for you.

If corporate managers learned anything during the 1990s dot-com boom, it was that big software applications are a big headache to install. Fortunately, many Web 2.0 tools are designed to solve discrete tasks, and because they're Web-based, they don't require installation on your hard drives. That means they're relatively easy to test drive.

Talk with your staff to identify common pain points or frustrations with your current systems. Then look for Web 2.0 services that address those problems. (Chances are, you'll be able to try out various offerings for free — or very cheaply.) Looking for inspiration? Explore the directories at Go2Web20 or All Things Web 2.0 to get a sense of the different Web 2.0 services you can use to meet your company's needs.

At Erickson Retirement Communities, which builds and manages senior housing and healthcare facilities, one recurring headache is choosing sites for new facilities. In addition to housing, each of the company's campuses offers restaurants, medical services, insurance, and transportation, so the site-selection process can take years. "It's a challenge to access all the necessary data because of information silos in our organization," CEO Mark Erickson says.

Now, Erickson uses a Web 2.0 prediction tool called Inkling that lets his planning staffers bet on the probability of each potential site to reach completion. Inkling works like a stock market, but each stock is a proposition, such as, "The facility in Madison, Wisconsin, will be completed in May 2009." Employees working on the project use virtual currency to buy and sell shares in the idea anonymously; if no one's putting their money behind the Madison project, it's probably a loser. Inkling didn't fundamentally change any business forecasts, Erickson says, but it has helped the company focus attention on specific questions. "We struggle with having more information than we can use, categorize, or process," he says. "This not only gave people access to information they may not have been looking at, it provided a context for why it was important."

Another easy way to get started with Web 2.0 is via plug-ins — applications that add functionality to the software your staff already knows how to use. For example, a Microsoft Outlook plug-in called Timebridge integrates information from group calendars and email, making scheduling a bit easier without forcing anyone to change their habits.

Build Support from the Ground Up

Goal: Recruit a core group of employees who will embrace new technology and a new management approach.

In theory, everyone wants to be part of a twenty-first century company that constantly strives for excellence. In practice, most people just want to be home in time for dinner. For many, the idea of learning how to use a new piece of software ranks right up there with dental work in the hierarchy of fun things to do.

Still, some employees will gladly embrace things that are new, either because they have performance-related incentives to do so or because they just like to be on the cutting edge. Such people often influence the opinions of others in your company, because their enthusiasm tends to be infectious. Find these folks, recruit them to become your testers, then let them spread the word — bad or good.

Start with a small group of testers and establish some specific — and easily attainable — goals. Although you want to encourage exploration, the most important thing is to score some early victories by figuring out what tools work best for your team.

Pick a non-technical person to lead the way. This isn't a job for IT. To be sure, your CIO or system administrator should have a hand in selecting Web 2.0 services to ensure they are both secure and compatible with your existing infrastructure. Ultimately, however, Web 2.0 is about encouraging people to collaborate and share, and that's the kind of message that should come from management — not from your sysadmin.

"The clearest thing a manager can do is to lead by example and set clear expectations," says Andrew McAfee, an associate professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School. So if you're leading a project that will produce a final report, insist that the team generate the report collectively and keep each other up to date using a wiki or document collaboration platform. If someone emails instead — and they will — respond via the platform.

"Have somebody running the project who has enough skills and experience to articulately provide options to decision makers," adds Jeff Micellef a managing partner at MiPro Enterprises, a professional services conglomerate. When MiPro went looking for Web 2.0 human resources tools, "we decided to designate one person to take the project and run with it," Micellef says. "That cut out a lot of the normal bureaucracy."

MiPro's top management tapped one of the company's executive vice presidents to lead the charge, supplying her with a dedicated team and empowering her to make a product recommendation. The VP chose to deploy Workday's Human Capital Management tool, and she successfully rolled the new human-resources system out to 365 workers in 31 organizations in just three weeks.

One final suggestion: You may be tempted by a "solution" that will re-engineer your business process and reinvent your company. Don't fall for it. Strive for evolution, not revolution. Web 2.0 tools have the potential to reshape business as much as the original dot-com revolution did, but the transformation will take just as long to solidify.

Experiment and Extend

Goal: Determine which Web 2.0 tools do the job best, and build upon that success.

Market Darwinism hasn't hit the web 2.0 world — yet. Plenty of hungry, venture capital-enabled Web 2.0 startups are still scrambling to find a niche for their products. Many of these companies also hope to be acquired (instead of profiting directly from the revenues their products might generate). The dream of becoming Google's next YouTube is, understandably, very seductive.

For most of these startups, the operative mantra is, "Release early and often." That means some products may not be ready for prime time at your company. Glitches, missing features, and counter-intuitive interfaces are endemic in this immature marketplace. And even when a Web 2.0 service works fine, it may not fit with the way your company operates. That means you should be prepared to try out several competing products — and then kick most of them to the curb.

Luckily, most Web 2.0 services are either free or provided for a relatively cheap monthly subscription fee. They're also Web-based, so there's no software to install or uninstall. If something isn't working, you just stop using it.

Karen Christensen, CEO of Berkshire Publishing Group, has experimented with plenty of collaboration tools. Berkshire specializes in books about global trends, with a special emphasis on China, so Christensen has employees all over the world. Online collaboration would enable her far-flung teams of writers and editors to share files and schedules, manage projects, track time, and send messages.

First Christensen tried using the popular Basecamp project collaboration toolset because it combines features like file sharing, whiteboards, and FTP that her teams already use as separate applications. Nevertheless, her staff still needed to learn how to use Basecamp, and it didn't include all the functionality she needed. "People felt like they were spending more time managing the thing than getting work done," Christensen says.

Christensen still dreams of finding her perfect collaboration tool. "When something works and it meets a real need," she says, "we know it — and then we pursue it."

Give Power to the People

Goal: Encourage employees and customers to use Web 2.0 tools in ways you never would have imagined.

Internet 1.0 technologies like email and static web pages flattened hierarchies by reducing the power of traditional gatekeepers (such as middle managers or executive assistants) who controlled the flow of information. Web 2.0 takes this idea even further by encouraging participation from everyone in an organization — and beyond. Indeed, Web 2.0 technologies not only provide access to information, they also empower users to add, edit, and manipulate it.

Decisions about which Web 2.0 tools to use within your company should be made centrally, but the question of how to use them should be left to individuals, says Harvard's McAfee. "It works best when we think globally and act locally," he says. Choosing one blogging platform or prediction-market tool for your company is a prudent way to ensure that information won't become trapped within departmental walled gardens.

Once the technology is introduced, different departments or business units should be free to use it as they see fit. "Most people inside an organization know what's kosher and what's not," McAfee says.

Still, allowing this level of decentralized control can be unsettling, even for tech-savvy companies like Microsoft. Though the software giant is notorious for keeping an iron grip on its public-relations machine, Microsoft decided to give its employees the freedom to create their own public blogs. Anyone is allowed to blog using company-supplied blogging tools, with no reporting, no review process, and no tie-ins to business goals. Instead, Microsoft has posted a "common sense policy" listing guidelines such as, "If you doubt the appropriateness of a blog entry, publish it to an internal blog first, ask a peer what they think, and then read it the next day before posting externally."

Microsoft's HR department turned its JobsBlog into a recruiting tool. "It started as a brainstorm between two recruiters who wanted to share a little about the experience of interviewing at Microsoft," says Jenna Adorno, a Microsoft staffing managers who posts to JobsBlog. The site has helped uncover coding talent as far away as Brazil, Pakistan, and Vietnam, and it addresses many commonly asked questions — thus reducing the amount of time staffers spend answering phones or replying to email. It's unlikely that senior managers at Microsoft ever envisioned a blog could do those sorts of things.