Are discussion forums the ultimate Enterprise 2.0 killer-app?
A week ago, I wrote about the success the BBC has had with a discussion forum to kick-off knowledge and information sharing.
This made me think, first about the fact that discussion forums are not often mentioned among the so called Enterprise 2.0 tools. As if they are not “worth” it?
Second, discussion forums might be the easiest in terms of adoption as they exist for so long now (part of Web 1.0). A lot of people will know the tools from their ventures on the Internet. Of all Enterprise 2.0 tools like wiki’s, blogs, tagging, the outsider the “discussion forum”, might be the easiest to introduce and often with clear immediate value.
General features of discussion forums:
- many-to-many (everybody can ask a question or start a discussion; anybody can step in)
- different sub-forums and category within a forum (providing structure)
- tracking tools like “subscribe to this thread”
- structured information on users (location, number of posts etc.)
- content is searchable and linkable
- WYSIWYG editing (!!)
One could see a discussion forum as a company-wide group blogging tool, albeit a very rough one.
Of course the statement above is a bit harsh. Forums differ from real blogging tools in some important ways:
- It’s “many-to-many” in stead of “one-to-many”
- Not person based, but more often theme, tool or department based (not for a CEO talking to the people I guess)
- No RSS per thread/sub-forum/category (have not seen it but it must be possible in a forum too!)
And of course a discussion forum is not like a wiki too:
- no structured storing of information on logical places (apart from sub-forums or categories)
- there is no aggregator or gardener in a forum to bring together question, arguments and the answers in one section or paragraph
So, discussion forums do not replace blogs and wiki’s, which do have their separate “strengths”, but tend to have some real adoption issues as well.
So to recount, let us list the main pro’s of discussion forums:
- just plain Q&A or information sharing
- the information remains stored and available
- the information is linkable and searchable
- community building
- customisation to different company entities / divisions / employee specialisms or enterprise applications (via sub-forums and categories)
- easy editing (WYSIWYG).
Of course, creating a lively discussion forum has challenges of its own (like “what’s in it for me to contribute”), but in my opinion it could be the tool with the lowest possible hurdle to achieve some genuine information sharing on the Intranet.
By the way, here are two excellent resources on discussion forum building, providing tips to avoid common pitfalls:
So what do you think? Should Enterprise 2.0 start with the good old discussion forum, smoothing the path for the much harder to introduce weblogs and wiki’s?
Edit: visit Rod Boothby’s blog for valuable reaction to this post!
Technorati tag(s): Discussion forums, Bulletin boards, Enterpriseweb2.0, Enterprise2.0, Web 2.0, Wiki, Blog, Internal blog, Social software, Knowledge Management, KM, Intranet
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posted Oct 16, 10:22 pm on Oct 16, 2006 |
category: Social software
/ Blogging
Marcel
Interesting post on discussion forums. One way in which these have successfully bridged to the more real time, enterprise 2.0 world is through persistent group chat. Parlano has been providing these solutions to financial services firms for years, and now a growing number of non-financial services industries are beginning to adopt group chat on top of their enterprise IM solutions. Once the real time infrastructure is in place (IM/presence) group chat almost becomes discussion threads on steroids, and rather then a place to go for information (statis discussion boards), chat creates a live, real time dashboard of topic based conversations that are important to the organization. It’s the first app turned on and last app turned off everyday for knowledge workers.
Some firms have linked blogs and wikis (where they post static research or files) to the real time group discussion. Today’s business world requires faster, better, more informed communcaton and information awareness. Email is too slow, cluttered and loses the contextual threads too easy. IM is only temporary, one to one messages, and best served for deciding where to lunch. Portals, wiki’s and blogs (as a category) are too static…no one lives in them or manages their business in them, day to day….they periodically come and go.
So firms resort back to a combination of IM and Email for real time or near real time solutions, and blogs/wikis/portals for static, less time sensitive material. This creates a disjointed solution and frustrated end users. The real answer is to allow for structured or unstructered group conversations, that persist and move the competitive needle forward in a real time way…by briding effectively these other solutions, as needed.
— Nick Fera Oct 17, 11:48 pm #
Marcel,
Pardon my ignorance on the latest features on discussion forums. But, are there any discusson forum engines that allow to TAG topics or event individual entries? If somebody does this combined with decent search capabilities or with a capable RSS reader that captures those tags, then you might get closer to a more real time group application.
— Ricardo Carreon Oct 18, 07:09 pm #
Ricardo,
Thanks for visiting here and sharing your experience.
You’re quite right that a good old discussion forum with some tagging add-on and rss-per-thread could be very powerful.
These days I hope to be looking around the most important forum applications out there to check them out.
Best regards,
Marcel
— Marcel Oct 18, 08:34 pm #
Back to the 80s – if it was good enough for Compuserve, it should be good enough for the enterprise.
— Edward Vielmetti Dec 13, 12:25 am #