Clean SLATES

A colleague shared with me an article by Andrew P. McAfee in the MIT Sloan Management Review entitled Enterprise 2.0: the Dawn of Emergent Collaboration.

Andrew's blog entry on the topic is also worth attention.

OK... I sense the rolling of eyes (2.0 at a time)… aren’t we all tired of Everything 2.0. Maybe, but if you’re looking for a memorable pneumonic that actually imparts insight, this article has it.

The piece distinguishes between information systems as platforms (websites, intranets, portals) and channels (email, instant messaging, telephone, conversation). The one category, created by the few, accessible to the many. The other, created by many, for the many, but very little sharing. Enter Web 2.0.

McAfee’s pneumonic is SLATES, and it helps expose how platforms and channels can be brought closer and made more effective in ways that enhance productivity and effectiveness. Yes, we’ve seen most of these elements before. It is in the ease of recombination that they change how things work.

Paraphrasing McAfee:

Search: Find what you need, enhanced by emergent description (see tags, below)

Links: More to the point, link relationships or link ranking algorithms

Authoring: Ease of content creation – spare me the angle brackets, make it bone simple

Tags: What do my colleagues call this? I bet it works better than what the IT department calls it

Extensions: If you thought X was [good | interesting | important | useful], you might, by extension find Y similarly so

Signals: tell me something has changed

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Image: this owl was kind enough to pose for me along the side of the road on the way to Paradise in Mt. Rainier National Park this past weekend.