This makes sense: "It comes down to a simple truth: content without context and process is meaningless." The author of this truism is Dennis Howlett. He is talking about Enterprise 2.0, a fancy, over-the-top term describing a bunch of different technologies, some call them tools, others call them platforms, still others call them social media or web 2.0. Not a lot of small and medium enterprise, SME, owners probably stay on top of all of this and noone would expect you to. Even companies that have huge dedicated IT departments barely know what these terms mean. But you have used them and you sense that they have value somehow because in our NetSuite consulting practice almost all new clients not only want a new website, but they want the ability to relate to customer in some more personal way. Blogging, wikis, forums, Facebook, LinkedIn. You know what these are. Well, there is a group of people who have tried to make a career out of these 'ideas', selling them to large corporate customers and they needed to put on some marketing clothes before they rode into the corporate castle. As a result you will find more strange euphemisms and acronyms in this area of technology than any other. But even with the marketing terms all laid out they have still run into a very recalcitrant corporate buyer. It's all just a lot of content unless it has a context to give it use and meaning and there is a process that brings it to life. I look at so much of this stuff and it's all nouns, there are no verbs on the screen; I'm never quite sure what to do with it. But there have been some interesting developments lately. Oracle has recently released Social CRM. It's an interesting concept because it takes the normal sales application and adds a layer of knowledge management, gleaned from the experience of colleagues, and a layer of colloaboration with this colleagues to give sales people a reason to use the software other than helping management create a pipeline report. Coming from the SME space the one point that I noticed was that in order for an application like this to work you need many sales people. This is not an application for a company with 10 or 20 sales people. But I think that Oracles first step in this direction is an important one. I would personally like to see NetSuite add some collaboration functionality to the suite. For example, too much business is done over e-mail. Some of you will say of course, and others will think I've lost my marbles. But think about all of the threads on a sale or an engineering design and how they are all lost later when the dust settles or someone leaves the company. Not a good thing. If the two or four engineers had a way to collaborate where the messages could be all kept together and later mined for knowledge they contain, all that work collaborating would not be lost. For our NetSuite consulting practice we use Basecamp by 37 Signals. It's an excellent tool and helps us collaborate on all aspects of the implementation. As for the future of E2.0 I think that much more of it must be integrated into the ERP and CRM systems that business is already using. Having it floating out in the technology lalasphere isn't doing anyone any good. I'm not the only one thinking this way, obviously. Bob Warfield of SmoothSpan, one of our guest bloggers, works for a company called HelpStream and they have integrated collaboration functionality with their Case Management system. Sounds right on the money. | 
