ment. This allows users and Oracle’s executives to share control.
“People are more interested in connecting with people rather
than just content devoid of any personal connection. It’s the
people that make the content interesting and valuable. Which
articles do you read most, the ones posted on the intranet or
those links e-mailed to you by a friend? Connect was built in
about two-and-a-half weeks. Within three days, with no internal
marketing, there were more than 10,000 users,” says Pedrazzi.
NAVIGATING THE WATERS
So how is it that a Fortune 100 company like Oracle is embracing Web 2.0 technology? Its executives and employees know it’s
going to make the company stronger and keep it ahead of the
technology curve, says Pedrazzi. His advice: other companies
need to do the same or risk falling behind.
BOB ADLER
“There’s this mashing together of the enterprise world and
the consumer world. How to do this has not been completely
figured out. That is one of the key challenges for management
today: How you view the new Web—is it a threat or an opportunity?” he says. “Some organizations will stick with that older
command-and-control model, but it will become very clear very
quickly that if you don’t embrace the new Web, employees are
going to revolt, either by moving to more-innovative organizations or by staying put and quietly doing it themselves.”
“If you don’t embrace the new Web,
employees are going to revolt,
either by moving to more-innovative
organizations or by staying put and
quietly doing it themselves.”
—Paul Pedrazzi, Senior Director, Oracle
Finding the right balance, however, isn’t easy. This fall,
Oracle will give customers and partners a boost when some
of its new Oracle Web 2.0 applications migrate from behind
its firewall. In the meantime, says Pedrazzi, you don’t have to
throw open your infrastructure and let anyone run anything.
Instead, start small, looking at ways you can improve your
employees’ day-to-day activities. This could be as simple as
offering a collaboration tool or a solid Web-based project management tool that can reduce bureaucracy and red tape, he says,
and making sure you have executives’ buy-in in the form of
their own participation. If the rank and file see their executives
diving in, adoption will be easier.
“People growing up, fresh out of college, are on MySpace and
put their photos on Flickr,” says Pedrazzi. “Then they come to
the enterprise, and they say, ‘All we have is e-mail? This is not
the way I want to work.’ When you look at your employees and
you think about employee satisfaction, retention, when people
are the core of your business, you’re going to pay attention and
make these modifications, not because you want to be cool and
embrace Web 2.0 but because you know that it’s the best thing
to do to maintain the competitiveness of your business.” <>
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