Structured data in an Enterprise 2.0 environment

[Sean Lew]

Enterprise 2.0 deals very well with human communication and unstructured data. People write something and RSS feeds gets send off and others come back with comments and updates. All good. Information is organised into spaces and people work within spaces they are interested in and are allowed to explore into other relevant spaces/articles. Still very good.

However, alot of employees deals with reports coming out from the ERP, CRM and other systems that contains numbers and structured information. These reports requires analysis and deep understanding of the data. So far many of the enterprise 2.0 software does not allow users to collaborate and communicate such information. I think its highly critical for software to start targeting this area of organisations.

Structured and unstructured data is supposed to be together. Its all information and all information should live in the same place. Historically, most systems cope well with one or the other type of data but not both. I think technology has come to the point where we can start doing both efficiently.

How could this be used? Imagine a manager gets a report generated on a regular basis and his team need to rectify some issues in the report or he needs to work on the report for a higher level presentation on business performance of his department or etc… Generally, these tasks requires some levels of collaboration, questions needs to be asked, tasks needs to be tracked, work needs to be done. If the report was generated and posted into the E2 platform regularly and automatically, then registered users can get notified when its up, start working on it and get other relevant people to come contribute as and when required. That will be so much more efficient, the report data is not hidden in the manager’s computer and everyone gets access to the right piece of information – that’s a winner.

What do you think? Should structured and unstructured data live together? (let’s leave the technical questions out for now – I know there are issues in that space but its really more for a discussion later down the track)



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