Can You Tag Your Enterprise?

No one sees companies abandoning workflow tools, however, in favor of tagging alone. For one thing, most current tagging tools are not available commercially—though there is interest. Chris Fralic, vice president of business development at Del.icio.us, says that a number of companies had contacted the company before it was purchased by Yahoo, looking for a corporate version of its tagging tools.

Yahoo offers Del.icio.us and Flickr and has some beta offerings in the works, and Del.icio.us has inspired other things that might help CIOs. For instance, Jonathan Feinberg, an advisory software engineer at IBM, saw Del.icio.us and decided he wanted a version for the host of bookmarks he has on IBM’s intranet, so he built a program he calls Dogear.

It functioned so well that IBM’s CIO Bob Greenberg designated Dogear as part of the company’s Technology Adoption Program, which IBM uses to help it leverage good ideas from research. Dogear was opened for use across IBM in November, and a mere 1,235 of IBM’s 329,000 employees have logged in to the tool more than once.

But Feinberg and his manager, David Millen, an IBM Research scientist, have already refined Dogear, giving it privacy designations (for instance, for those bookmarks people want to keep to themselves). And they’ve added Really Simple Syndication to let people know when content has been "dogeared." What the company doesn’t know is how many users you need to make Dogear worthwhile. That will become clearer in 2006, says Millen, as several IBM customers are expected to try Dogear.

No matter the company’s size, there will be management issues. Yahoo’s Fake says the tendency within a company is to think that social software is driven by users and thus self-managing, but this is often not the case. "Somebody needs to take responsibility for [the systems], and that’s something companies don’t understand," Fake says. "They need a community manager."

Fake says all sorts of companies will find that tagging helps them define their actual culture. She talks about the value of the "cool lamp" test—if you type "cool lamp" into Google, the first thing that comes up is a lava lamp, which to her is decidedly uncool. But in a group she’s involved with on the tag-driven site Yahoo MyWeb, typing in "cool lamp" generated results that she thought were very cool indeed. Similar technology could prove very valuable in corporations, for instance, where people in research and others in sales might have very different opinions about, say, what kinds of "product details" are interesting, with one group concerned more about material lists and manufacturing constraints and the other interested in profit margins and sales incentives. Companies could also test product concepts by letting users tag them and see what terms they use.