Wow, read a great and very pertinent article, “A Practical Guide to Implementing Web 2.0 (aka Social Networking Tools) in Your Organization” which hits very close to home. I’ve been experimenting and pushing the use of social networking tools at work and see lots of what is described in the article. And after attending a recent Knowledge Management Conference and meeting others working similar issues, the points of the article are driven deeper even more.

I have to blog more about this at work! But here are some interesting quotes from the article:

users have to resort to the dreaded search bar on the Intranet, too. Most people I speak to use this only as a last resort, and rarely find anything useful — they quickly give up and look for a real person to provide what they’re looking for

The final lemon in our trio is groupware (though the term, which is now disparaging, is rarely used). Groupware, of which the most notorious example is SharePoint, was designed to facilitate ‘communities of practice’ (CoPs)

Most groupware tools are so horrifically over-engineered and bloated with ‘features’ that they require full-time IT resources to manage, and to set up and ‘authorize’ new CoPs

From my experience, you should question the need for everything on the Intranet beyond directories and policies

Ah heck, there’s too much to list! Read the entire article for all it wisdom.