Corporate Australia (finally) engages in Web 2.0 and virtual worlds

There was a good article in The Australian on Tuesday titled Taking residence in virtual worlds, which looked at what some of Australia’s leading companies are doing with Web 2.0 technologies. It quoted me:

“Almost all major Australian organisations have put this on their radar and begun trials,” Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson says.

“Next year is when this will be a standard approach or framework to look at how organisations shift information architecture. In most cases it’s not a question of taking out existing tech but using complementary systems.”

I have spent much of the last month or so speaking to Australia’s leading companies, technology journalists, and thought leaders in the field in order to uncover the best examples of Enterprise 2.0 in Australia to showcase at Future Exploration Network’s Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum on 19 February 2008 in Sydney. More on what I have uncovered and the event itself shortly – there are many very exciting developments on the forum to share.

Certainly what I have found is that just about every major organization has at least a toe in the Enterprise 2.0 waters at least somewhere within the folds of its operations. One innovator in one of Australia’s largest organizations, with a larger international than domestic presence, told me of a number of interesting initiatives in one of its business units, then said, “but of course we’d be forced to shut it down if the senior executives found out about it.” In other cases initiatives are not deliberately hidden from executives, but they receive no support. However a good proportion of organizations are engaging in officially sanctioned pilots of wikis or blogs, taking steps to make social networking useful, or using other social media tools. The majority are pretty early stage, and not experiments they care to share externally. However we are getting to the point at which there are solid examples of corporates getting real value from Enterprise 2.0 approaches.

Even though most of what is happening is very early stage, given the breadth of what is happening across corporate Australia, and also the far more advanced activities I am seeing in many US organizations, it seems indeed that 2008 will be the year Enterprise 2.0 becomes solidly in Australia. The value will be too hard to ignore, and the evidence of successes visible. The primary intention of our Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum will be to make that case, and to help positive momentum by putting these issues squarely on the agenda.

However despite the relative lack of local case studies, there are some very good ones, several of them referred to in The Australian article. I pointed the journalist to many of these cases. I will blog in more detail about some of them later, and also about other interesting cases I’ve uncovered.

Westpac’s Chief Technology Officer David Backley, who will be speaking at our Executive Forum is quoted most extensively in the article, discussing how Westpac is investigating the use of Second Life, in the first instance using it as the location for its induction training. Backley is quoted in the article:

“People felt more comfortable asking questions in that environment than a normal classroom or lecture environment. It breaks down some of the barriers, especially when people don’t know each other.”

The bank will take the next two to three months to consider whether Second Life should be used across the business, but Backley thinks it will go ahead.

“It helps overcome the difficulty of communicating to 30,000 people, and the difficulty of getting people together from different locations and time zones to disseminate information.

“It also simplifies issues such as the amount of training you need to provide and the information to be provided.

“We saw it as a way of getting information out without the flying, driving and time-consuming travel to a central location.”

Deloitte Australia is also testing Second Life, as well as using Facebook extensively. Stuart Johnston of Deloitte was quoted:

“Facebook took off through individuals and social networking at a rate we’ve never seen before because of digital media.

“Organisations can’t stop it from happening, so it’s more how to participate in this rather than how to control it.”

De Bortoli Wines has been doing some great things in the space, which I will blog about in more detail later. De Bortoli’s Bill Robertson was quoted:

“We use hosted Google applications, online spreadsheets, online documents and email.

“We don’t have wikis internally but our intranet is an open-source CMS that gives our users the rights to edit, which is a very similar way to use a wiki for doing internal documentation.”

More details on all of these stories in the article – well worth a read. Far more soon on this blog on cases and examples of the best of what’s happening in the space.