Passage 1

The introduction of Web 2. 0 technologies into the enterprise greatly increases the value of your company' s most important assets: employees’ knowledge, relationships, and initiative. Making knowledge more visible increases innovation and shortens turnaround times. Increased collaboration accelerates productivity. Your company transforms into a more-socially connected organization that reacts faster and more effectively to the market.

The consumer Web has shown us the power of the internet as a social， collaborative platform, particularly when compared to existing rigid corporate environments. Wikis, blogs, Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds, social networks, tagging, and mashups are flexible, user-driven tools that have the potential to bring many benefits to the enterprise. Leading companies are harnessing Web 2. 0 technologies and applying them to build their next- generation workplaces. The new Enterprise 2. 0 workplace becomes an internet-powered, user-focused, and community- centric social fabric. This social Web ties together people, ideas, content, processes, systems, and other enterprise artifacts. Importantly, these connections are both explicit (for example, let’ s have a meeting) and implicit (for example, tracking user activities to rank the relative value of documents) .

In addition to connections, another key aspect of the social Web is its participative or do-it-yourself (DIY) nature. Employees are empowered to create and publish content that is easily consumable both internally within the company and externally by customers and partners. The social Web captures and makes accessible previously invisible knowledge, and ignites new conversations among employees that lead to new innovations that would not have previously occurred.

However, Web 2. 0 technologies in the enterprise have significant differences from the consumer Web. Enterprises have many mission-critical processes and must often adhere to regulatory requirements. Thus, there is a need for these new tools to provide high availability, security, and integration with existing systems and applications to support data confidentiality, system reliability, auditability, and other IT requirements. Inside the enterprise, these Web 2. 0 solutions must be deployable in an integrated fashion by IT to provide employees with secure access to DIY features and integration with relevant legacy systems such as customer relationship management and e-mail. Other considerations such as liability， reputation， and validated information must also be considered, especially when Web 2. 0 technologies are used for external-facing initiatives.

So how do you make this exciting new workplace a reality? Most companies don’ t just need a blog or wiki or social network. Their needs extend beyond to an array of custom social applications that improve productivity across many business processes and spur innovation across the enterprise. These social applications must provide user experiences that encourage employee participation and are enterprise secure. What most businesses want is a flexible, enterprise-class platform for building and deploying social applications as their needs evolve.

Oracle addresses this market need by providing the industry’ s most comprehensive portfolio of portal, user interaction, and Enterprise 2. 0 solutions. This portfolio from Oracle Fusion Middleware includes Oracle WebCenter Suite and Oracle WebCenter Services (both of which include capabilities from Oracle WebCenter and WebCenter Interaction, formerly BEA AquaLogic User Interaction) . Oracle’ s portal, user interaction, and Enterprise 2. 0 portfolio provides user-centric services, including collaboration, Web publishing, search, and analytics, as well as foundational services such as security, content indexing, Web services assembly, and application integration. The Enterprise 2. 0 capabilities offer tools for user-built collaborative Web applications such as blogs and wikis, tagging and expertise discovery, and developer-driven enterprise mashups.

In the pages that follow, several examples of innovative companies benefiting from Enterprise 2. 0 are presented.

Lessens from Industry Innocators I

nvestment Bank: Wikis for IT Project Management

Several groups in IT at this investment bank had been experimenting with wikis for basic content collaboration. The IT department decided to expand its use of a corporate wiki instead of using e-mail to create meeting agendas and share documents, schedules, new hire training videos, and other materials. Six months after the expanded launch, traffic on the 2, 000-page wiki surpassed that of the company’ s intranet, more than 25 percent of the bank' s workforce were active users, and there was a 75 percent drop in e-mails on projects using wikis.

Manufacturer: Tagging for Knowledge Discovery and Research

Social bookmarking and tagging allows employees to easily locate and manage information collaboratively and also network with like-minded colleagues.

This 120, 000-person global manufacturing company uses social bookmarking and tagging technology within its intranet and enables its employees to bookmark and tag documents, see which other users tried similar searches, and create knowledge groups on the fly. The result is that knowledge workers can easily locate and manage information collaboratively and also network ④ with like-minded colleagues within a secure, transparent environment.

Technology Firm: Wikis + Blogs + Tagging + Social Networks = Intranet 2. 0

This Fortune 500 ⑤ company uses a broad set of Web 2. 0 collaborative technologies across all departments. The primary goal of its social computing initiative was to enhance worker productivity through improved information sharing and collaboration. The initiatives grew organically by word of mouth and were always managed by a central “lock-down” team located in corporate IT. The result has been a wildly successful shift to Enterprise 2. 0 with more than 70, 000 people using the new intranet every day including accessing more than 4, 000 blogs, more than 5, 000 wiki pages, and many new communities built via social networks.

Healthcare Company: Tagging to Improve Enterprise Search

This leading healthcare provider with 40, 000 employees in more than 190 countries was looking for ways to connect people and information for more-effective decision-making. The company implemented social bookmarking and tagging across the organization to encourage collaborative information sharing and create a more-searchable knowledgebase from intranet content. The results are that more than 10 percent of users are contributing to the collective knowledgebase, and the company is now looking to leverage tagging as a primary classifying method for its intranet search function.

Consumer Goods Manufacturer: Next-Generation Employee Collaboration with Enterprise Social Computing Platform

In conversations with this global company, it was revealed that the organization wanted to dramatically improve employee collaboration and drive faster product innovation cycles. Specific collaboration projects included the following: improve best practice sharing, create more- effective knowledge management, enhance quality of employee discussions, and ultimately improve knowledge worker productivity. The company had already used wikis, blogs, tagging, RSS feeds, and other Web 2. 0 tools, but wanted to unify deployment without sacrificing modularity and flexibility. It was interested in creating a social networking environment for employees that incorporated personal activity feeds and expertise networks as well as existing tools. The result is that the IT department has built an enterprise Face book application on a social computing platform that incorporates many of the Web 2. 0 collaboration tools and provides foundational services for building social applications.

Pharmaceuticals: Web 2. 0 Enabled Collaborative Communities for Sales, Marketing, and R&D Initiatives

By integrating new blog and wiki capabilities with an existing company intranet, a pharmaceutical company maximized the reuse of existing applications, security, and content, leading to an increase in cross-team collaboration, a reduction in e-mail traffic, and growth in new innovations.

A global provider of life science products and services for academic, government, and pharmaceutical organizations suffered from poor collaboration, e-mail overuse, and lack of centralized communities for sharing information. The company deployed wiki and blogging capabilities integrated with its existing intranet. By integrating these Web 2. 0 tools with the existing intranet, the company minimized the learning curve users experienced with these new tools and maximized reuse of existing applications, security, and content that was already available on its intranet. The company' s sales, marketing, and R&D organizations have built and managed dynamic collaborative communities that increase cross-team collaboration; reduce e-mail traffic; and spawn new innovation in products, services, and marketing campaigns.