January 01, 2007
Adventures In X-treme Web 2.0
Specialty retailer EMS uses blogs, wikis, and BI tools to expand collaboration internally and externally with business partners.
Jeffrey Neville, CIO, Eastern Mountain Sports
Specialty retailer EMS uses blogs, wikis, and BI tools to expand collaboration internally and with business partners.
At Eastern Mountain Sports, we like to use interesting new technologies to engage users and partners and make it easier to do business with us. Toward that goal, Web 2.0 technologies are a perfect fit, and we intend to expand their usage.
We're focusing the first phase of our Web 2.0 implementation on the IT group and other savvy users. Later, we'll pull in business users, vendors, and strategic partners as we drive collaborative conversations across the extended enterprise. We're also experimenting with various types of conversations internally, as I'll outline below.
What led us to this plan? We know that end users have a high degree of experience in finding and sharing information. Outside of their work lives, they participate in online communities that routinely employ so-called Web 2.0 technologies such as RSS feeds, Weblogs, and wikis that let groups of people create content and exchange insights. Increasingly, users want to apply the same sorts of tools in the work environment, and to easily access data that's tailored to the roles they play in the organization and the business metrics they influence.
At EMS, Web 2.0 tools encourage collaboration within our analytic dashboards—not only to find, summarize, and integrate relevant data, but also to ease the process of sharing it with internal and external stakeholders in an interactive way. We use RSS feeds to report on exceptions and alert users when certain operational metrics are out of tolerance range. And we're experimenting with wikis as a way to test hypotheses and spread new ideas across the organization. In short, Web 2.0 technologies are starting to influence our overall business intelligence (BI) strategy.
1 X-treme Web 2.0
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2 The Journey
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3 Driving Adoption
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4 Sidebar: EMS Defines Some Key Pieces Of Web 2.0
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