Too much information is too much

“On the Web, everyone can benefit from information shared by others. The business community has also woken up to the fact that there are tools and opportunities that decrease unnecessary work.”

If you’re looking for a pirated movie or music on the Web, you can easily stumble upon a service that lists available peer-to-peer files. The service provides easy access to information on which files are downloaded the most and user comments on why this is the case. The possible defects in the available files are often also listed.

Should we adapt this model to working life?

When you start looking for a file you need, for example a report or a quotation template, you could see all the relevant files with one search. At the same time, you could find out which files have been used the most by colleagues and what deficiencies and strong points they have perceived in the document in question.

Of course, the absolutely correct information would not necessarily become available just like that, but likelihood of finding it would increase considerably. You see, information is like malt whisky: you have to get enough of it, but not too much.

On the Web, everyone can benefit from information shared by others. The business community has also woken up to the fact that there are tools and opportunities that decrease unnecessary work. This is what Enterprise 2.0 thinking is all about.

In practice, this means three things: corporate level mash-up applications, which are used to combine information from various different services into new wholes; new ways of cooperating (co-creation); and utilisation of users’ values and the choices already made by them (co-filtering).

Teamwork technology is not a new thing. The difference is that now the team is not defined beforehand, nor is it a question of a project team, working group or other specifically appointed committee. Enterprise 2.0 applications aim to lower the communications threshold within an organisation. The decision to share ideas with others rests with the user.

User participation decides whether an Enterprise 2.0 application rises or falls. There must be a combination of various systems so that the users feel they have a seamless whole at their disposal. Tools must be intuitive and easy to use, so that the user is motivated to participate. If the user would rather write the information on a yellow post-it note, the game is over.

History has taught us that approximately half of the projects based on the most recent technologies are implemented post haste without listening to users. The results are half-baked, everyone is disappointed.

Because Enterprise 2.0 is based precisely on voluntary cooperation by the users, it is likely that this will happen even now. But if we listen to the users and they understand the opportunities afforded by new technologies, the effect on productivity can be at the level of the introduction of spreadsheet computation or e-mail.

I believe that the new model will eventually find its way into most companies that have to scour large masses of information.

Enterprise 2.0 applications also present a way of cutting costs. They can be used squeeze the last juices out of costs that were already thought of as lost. Applications can, for example, be used to prolong the life cycle of existing systems because they provide a way to bypass laborious integration with other systems with the necessary search for master data. The greatest benefits of prolonged life cycle are most often achieved with the system’s updating, which causes the most anxiety among the information administration personnel.

Juha Lamminkari

Juha Lamminkari’s article on Enterprise 2.0 thinking was published in Tietoviikko magazine 30 January 2009.