A few weeks ago, I posted a short comment on potential uses of wikis as a means of creating collaborative engagement between a company and its communities, for example in the development of a regional environmental strategy.
Well, I just finished reading an article by Andrew McAffee in MIT Sloan Management Review called Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration which carries the same theme into positing new ways for companies to use Web 2.0 technologies to create and manage knowledge.
His thesis quite simply is that 'old' knowledge management platforms such as intranets will be replaced by group authorship -- mediated by blogs, wikis, tagging etc. -- which make "an episode of knowledge work widely and permanently visible." With Web 2.0 technologies you not only get the results of knowledge work stored in a searchable fashion, but you also get the process of creating the knowledge made observable.
His conclusion . . . "Enterprise 2.0 technologies have the potential to usher in a new era by making both the practices of knowledge work and its outputs more visible. Because of the challenges these technologies bring with them, there will be significant differences in companies' abilities to exploit them. Because of the opportunities the technologies bring, these differences will matter a great deal."
Exactly the same can be said of companies which choose -- or do not choose -- to explore how Web 2.0 technologies might change their relationship with their external stakeholders.