Web 2.0 = Corporate Intranet 2.0?

How quickly will Web 2.0 technologies (blogs, wikis, social networking tools) penetrate the workplace to consitiute a next-generation intranet? And when they do, what will their impact be?

Harvard professor Andrew McAbee thinks that the effect of Web 2.0 in the enteprise could be transformative, and that a lot of non-technical business trends are converging that will accelerate its adoption. His article in MIT's Sloan Management Review offers a blueprint for implementing what he calls SLATES (search, links, authoring, tags, extensions, signals) as a knowledge management system.

Not so fast, cautions IT gadfly Nicholas Carr. In a critique of McAfee's suggestion, Carr argues that Web 2.0 technologies remain immature, and that a key variable in such technologies' success is a time investment on the part of knowledge workers. "Managers, professionals and other employees don't have much spare time, and the ones who have the most valuable business knowledge have the least spare time of all," Carr writes. "Will they turn into avid bloggers and taggers and wiki-writers? It's not impossible, but it's a long way from a sure bet."

Source: Many2Many