Using Web 2.0 concepts for iLeadership.

• Author: Marcille, Kim
• Position: Technology

In the Information Age, every organization must have command of its flow of information to be effective and flourish--especially in today's challenging economy.

Web 2.0 technologies have emerged to allow richer, more meaningful collaboration between users by making information-handling practices more transparent and accessible. These same technological ideas can be used to accomplish similar results other companies have experienced.

Many executives find the "SLATES" acronym created by Andrew McAfee in his paper, Enterprise 2.0: The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration, to be helpful when defining the characteristics of Web 2.0 technologies.

SLATES stands for: Search, Links, Authoring, Tags, Extensions and Signals.

Focusing on the first three of these concepts and combining them with the following tips will help financial executives lead their organizations to treat information as the asset it really is.

* Search

Information is only valuable when it is accessible and can be found. Search is improved when multiple users participate in building the informational index.

In organizations large and small, information critical to the operation is tucked away in file drawers, individual hard drives and people's heads. Passwords, processes, equipment settings, critical contacts, customer preferences, system limitations and project statuses are examples of important data that may be difficult to access. In fact, some employees may hoard this kind of information to ensure their own importance to the organization.

As a leader, it's important to communicate not only the value of sharing information transparently and lifting it out of obscurity for the common good, but also the intrinsic value of information itself. Senior financial executives can do this by providing a platform where information can be shared and stored, and asking members of the organization to contribute and index the content.

In this process, financial executives may discover that multiple platforms are needed. For example, a team working on a new product can share their development process and ideas through a blog anyone in the organization can read and comment on.

The sales team may need a customer relationship-management system to track all the relevant information about their customers.

The marketing department might need a contact-management system to determine which efforts are working better than others. The intelligence that can be gathered from the reports the latter two platforms...