Ideas to Steal from the

C O N S U M E R

W O R L D

• Google Maps: Does your company have multiple locations around the world? Or maybe you own several buildings in downtown Manhattan? Then consider integrating Google Maps so that employees can find another employee’s physical locations more easily. See: Google Maps for Enterprise; Schmap inteactive mapping application (see also a screenshot, scroll down to Schmap)

• Skype IP Telephony: Maybe your company hasn’t made the move to Voice over IP. Or maybe you have a significant number of mobile workers. In either case, think about introducing a Skype-type solution so that employees save on their personal phone bills. See: The debate Skype is NOT enterprise ready vs Skype IS enterprise ready

• EBay Auctions: Most large companies have successful classified sections on their intranets. Why not take that a step further by integrating eBay-type auction functionality? Your employees will get a better deal on whatever they’re purchasing, and they’ll enjoy the chase. See: Vita Rara Reverse Auctions for HR

• Social Search: Yahoo is experimenting with social search (registration/sign-in required). They believe that most people are more interested in search results that are validated by their peer group. The same applies to corporate intranets. On intranets, it is hard to know which pages are most useful, especially when scanning a list of 900 search results. But what if the employee knew what everyone else in his or her department had found useful? That’s the power of social search. See: KM World "Visual unstructured data"; EI Magazine (fee-based article); Prefound.com; Yahoo lets publishers tailor search engines

• Podcasting: We all love our iPods. And now there’s an opportunity to use podcasting in the enterprise. Podcasting can be used for audio white papers, meeting recaps, product demos and virtual conferences. Your employees will be able to catch up on their work while driving into the office. They’ll love it. See: Palm_Source releases Open Source Code; Real Player Enterprise; excerpt from AARF's Digital Media Outlook 2006. Listen to: AARF develops Verizon with podcasts and gaming tech; "The rise of podcasting" NPR story

• UPC Codes: Save printing and mailing costs by moving information that needs to be distributed to different offices online. One company realized significant cost savings by publishing its UPC codes online for its sales force. Employees out in the field didn’t mind printing the UPC codes because they were getting them sooner. See: Cell phones scan UPC bar codes

• Blogging: 2005 was most certainly the year for blogging, both outside and inside the enterprise. Employees are realizing that the best way to communicate and share information quickly and effortlessly is through internalfacing blogs. CEOs blog to the external world and to their employees. Managers write about product delivery schedules, and HR leads keep blogs to notify employees about new initiatives. See: Blog survey; Microsoft's blogging software without HTML

• Social Tagging: Most companies invest heavily in enterprise-wide taxonomy initiatives that then form the basis of the navigation system and search interface on the company intranet. But consider using social tagging concepts whereby employees tag content themselves based on words that they would use to describe the content. It will create“bottom up” taxonomy, which will be more user-centric. See: Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise, IBM technology observations, Folksonomy, Game of Hi-Tech and High Stakes (paid subscription required); an insightful blog post on social tagging; Intranets Today on social tagging (limited access)

• Audience Rankings: Every day, hundreds of news items are published on intranets for employees. As a result, it is sometimes difficult to know what is important. But if you ask employees to rate the importance of each news item, it will make it simpler for other employees to uncover what is important. See: Digg Swarm and Digg Stack from Digg Labs

• Prediction Markets: Prediction markets capture group intelligence to drive decision making by aggregating individual opinion in a similar fashion to the way a stock market assigns a value to a company through a traded stock price. “Market predictions often outperform those of even the bestinformed expert.”—James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds. Companies are quickly adopting prediction markets in an attempt to leverage the collective wisdom of corporations. See: BusinessWeek 8-3-06 ; and Consulting the corporate crystal ball

• Mashups: Mashups allow the end-user at the browser level to create and share situational software through the combination of multiple applications. See: Mashups: The new breed of web app; IBM mainstreams mashups & web 2.0 technologies; The Quest for Enterprise Mashup Tools; Wikipedia's entry on Web 2.0

• Instant Messaging: Instant Messaging (IM) is hardly new, even within the enterprise. However, there is quite a bit of movement in the industry specific to instant messaging within the enterprise. Governance issues surrounding IM are complex. Perhaps current events will give a hint as to where EIM will be heading in the future. See: IBM Readies Linux Version of Sametime; also see "a quantative perspective"

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External Resources

• CEO Technology Guide (Business Week special feature)
• CIO podcast interview on the impact of consumer IT on the enterprise
• RSS-Podcasting-Blogs: Who wins?
• Video Portals at Penn Media
• Knowledge Management on Outside Input for intranets
• Streaming Video at Home Depot
• Keys to Competitive Sucess (enterprise software industry)
• New gadgets across hardware apps