Web 2.0 Uncovered – Blogs

You are reading a blog right now, potentially if you read this blog you may read many other blogs, but do you have a blog of your own? Over on our CPA Congress blog, my colleague Alex Dalidakis discussed how blogging about your CPA Congress experience could prove to be a valuable exercise. I’d like to talk about a few other reasons to consider creating your own blog.

The blog is an incredibly powerful and flexible tool, it can be used in many different ways to achieve many different outcomes, below are a few of my favourites.

News feed / marketing tool

A blog provides you with a simple means of providing news to your clients and colleagues. The CPA Congress blog is an example of a blog being used as a news feed. Throughout the life of CPA Congress 2008 the blog will provide delegates with the latest information about CPA Congress and related events and activities. Providing news of your latest accomplishments and projects can also become a valuable marketing tool.

Learning space

There are two main ways a blog can be used as a learning tool, to learn from yourself and to learn from others. I believe the most powerful learning occurs when the two come together. I have a blog which I use to record my thoughts, challenges and things I find interesting about my work. Simply going through the process of thinking through an issue and constructing a post often leads me to inspiration I may not have found. I’m fortunate enough that there are a few very smart people who occasionally read my blog, the insight they provide through their comments and suggestions have provided ideas and resources which regularly help me to be more effective in my work.

Work log

How often have you got to the end of the month and felt like you have been incredibly busy but could not describe what you were actually doing? Taking ten minutes a couple of times a week to jot down what you have been up to can provide you with a couple of benefits. Firstly, you have a record of work that you have been doing that you can refer back to, and secondly you have a record of your work that your colleagues, staff or clients can refer back to. In this post CPA Congress presenter Keith De La Rue talks about the importance of capturing stories. Capturing and publishing stories of work, challenges, problems and solutions may open doors for collaboration that may have otherwise gone unopened.

These are just three reasons to blog, my main advice is give it a try. Start by recording a few thoughts, if you are keen to build a network around your blog comment on blogs about topics similar to yours (Google Blog Search is a good place to start looking for blogs). I started blogging after hearing several people talk about how much they had learned from the discussions they had participated in through their blogs. After blogging for 6 months I couldn’t agree more, the trick is to give it a try, be persistent and experiment. You may not realise the benefit in the first week but after 3 months you may well look at blogging in a completely different light.

Mick Leyden
CPA Australia

Enterprise 2.0 Uncovered – Wikis

What’s in a wiki? Why wiki?

The wiki is a simple concept – it is a website that contains an edit option on each page. A visitor to the website can click on the edit button, change the content on the page, or link to another page on the web or within the wiki.

The wiki is a core tool in the growing suite of applications described as ‘Enterprise 2.0’: a phrase coined by Professor Andrew McAfee of Harvard Business School in March of 2006. It describes the use of social media tools by organisations as part of their work practice.

Earlier this year blogger Toby Ward, posted this item that discusses some Enterprise 2.0 success stories. He does use the term ‘Intranet 2.0’ rather than Enterprise 2.0 but in this context they are interchangeable (Thanks to Melbourne KM’er Andrew Mitchell for the link).

CPA Australia recently re-launched CPA Good Practice Guide – in a wiki platform.  Here is the official description:

“The CPA Good Practice Guide is a collaborative initiative between CPA Australia and its members. The online guide provides members with a comprehensive collection of tools, procedures, templates and checklists that can be used in day-to-day business situations.”

The Good Practice Guide itself is a useful KM tool. But, you may now be wondering, why have you put it into a wiki?

The main reason is the flexibility it offers. CPA Australia has adopted an enterprise wiki. That is, a wiki which along with the standard wiki features such as simple editing, tagging and cross-referencing, also integrates with the CPA Australia website and provides us with detailed access control options.

As a result of this flexibility we are able to rapidly add new content and enhance existing content. We are also now able to encourage contribution from users. The CPA Good Practice Guide has always been created and driven by members, it seems a natural extension to encourage direct contribution.

Currently the CPA Good Practice Guide is private and in ‘Comment Only’ mode, meaning only CPA Australia members or GPG contributors can view the guide and provide feedback using the comment function.

At this stage the Good Practice Guide resources themselves cannot be edited. The access control settings allow us to start out with a locked down version of the guide and over time create new areas where contribution is encouraged. The beauty of this system is that formally reviewed content and member generated content can be separated and clearly identified within the same website.

The wiki is a simple tool that opens up many new possibilities, the example I have outlined above is just one possibility. We are experimenting with a range of smaller scale ‘behind the firewall’ projects within CPA Australia, I’ll write more about the challenges and benefits of some of these over the coming months.

Have you implemented a wiki project? Tell us your stories about how it went.

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Mick Leyden
Project Executive – Knowledge Exchange
CPA Australia

Why has everything gone ‘2.0’?

Every day I encounter something else that has gone ‘2.0’. We’ve got web 2.0, enterprise 2.0., library 2.0, recruitment 2.0, marketing 2.0, learning 2.0, journalism 2.0 and that’s just the handful I can think of off the top of my head. The question is, why should you care about yet another techno revolution?

The answer is not because your Gen Y staff will expect to be in a Workplace 2.0. It is because behind every ‘2.0’ initiative is a group of people with ideas, passion, motivation and enthusiasm.

Let’s look at another term often used to describe Web 2.0 tools; ‘Social Media’. I believe this term is a little more appropriate as it describes the heart of the 2.0 revolution. It’s is about people and behaviour far more than technology. This from Social Media and Enterprise 2.0 strategist Ross Dawson:

“successful Web 2.0 initiatives in organizations are fundamentally about shifting attitudes and behaviours. Collaboration increasingly drives value creation in organizations, but for that technology is only an enabler.”

The last few words here are the key point to keep in mind when thinking about everything 2.0, ‘technology is only an enabler’. Over the next couple of weeks I am going to look at a few of the key 2.0 tools and trends. I’ll tell you what they are, how they work and most importantly why they are worth your attention.

To kick things off check out this video which I think does a great job of describing what web 2.0 (or Social Media) is all about.