Accenture gets into Intranet 2.0, another take

Some days ago I noted (much too short) Accenture’s efforts to introduce web 2.0 concepts into their corporate intranet, following a report from IT Business.

Now I’ve read Mike Gottas take on the news, where he basically welcomes the new addition to the “social software business case collection”, while pointing out that:

professional services has always been a pathfinder industry segment when it comes to early adoption of certain technology.

because

Connecting with other people in organizations that essentially “sell know how” is a perfect environment for introducing tools that help with information sharing, communication, collaboration and community-building (e.g., KM).

Yet he warns to see this case as a false positive, something I partially agree with, if only because it’s straight and normal business of IT consultancies to explore “the edges” and to prepare answers before clients ask.

But while exploring the edges of changing technologies is for sure no business any CIO engages in, they might ask Accenture (or other consultants, hint) for advice regarding this “enterprise 2.0”-thing they’ve heard about. So, I wonder whether this will turn out to be just another “case study” or the start of something bigger (like all the other consultancies marketing their very own efforts and experiences …).

Accenture gets into Intranet 2.0

Via IT Business, an insight into Accenture’s efforts to introduce web 2.0 concepts into their corporate intranet:

[…] borrowing ideas from online services such as Facebook, De.licio.us, YouTube, Wikipedia and Second Life to remake Accenture’s employee intranet.

Just this month, Accenture went live with a new global employee network that looks much like Facebook, the popular web site on which mostly young people share pictures and information about their interests.

Accenture also has visual, context-assisted search capabilities already up and running. […] picked up on the idea of allowing every user to tag content as the De.licio.us web site does, thus creating a co-operative way of classifying material that benefits all users.

[…] And there will be wikis – co-operatively edited Web pages – to allow anyone in the company to publish material for internal use. “If you make it easy for your employees to publish information, they’ll publish information,”

[…] “The younger employees carry it,” he says – they will be the first to publish on wikis, to tag content and so on. Others will follow as they see the value, though Rippert adds that some of the new capabilities, such as improved search functions, will replace the old way of doing things and employees will have little choice about using them.

I wonder what other elements will be introduced next. Social bookmarking would seem to be a logical next step, or perhaps internal blogs?