Large corporations implement web2.0 applications for internal use

Large companies, especially large conglomerates, are starting to use web-based social networking tools for employees. These tools will certainly improve communication within the organization, and will help solidify its internal culture. Moreover, cross disciplinary communication and collaboration, which will be facilitated by these tools, will also increase the creativity and the efficiency of the organization. There is one major shortcoming, these social networks are usually closed, they are only accessible to employees.

These new measures are the living proof that corporate managers are recognizing the need to manage the organization not as a machine, the command and control paradigm, but more as a community. Cool, the human factor is slowly coming back into the picture... It took them quite some time to realize that an individual needs more than just material gratification; that if you treat a human being as a replaceable and disposable piece of equipment, a "human resource", you will not get his/her full cooperation, and you will not benefit from his/her creativity. It is also about time for them to re-realize that groups are not merely clusters of individuals, and to give them the freedom to organize and to collaborate is far more advantageous than to divide them to better control them.

These big corporations are too late in trying to use the new technology to better their business. But their fundamental problem is not even there. It is their structure. They are hierarchical, closed structures. Please visit our Economical alternatives section to understand why open organic networks are economically far more superior to closed hierarchies, in the context of a knowledge-based economy.

Lockheed Martin gets social with a private network
By ANDY ROSEN, The Daily Record
Published 07/15/09
BALTIMORE (AP) — Lockheed Martin Corp. is setting up a private social network for employees to use in the course of business as a means to discuss tasks from projects to purchasing. And though the network itself won't be open to the outside world, the program that supports it will be.
Company officials are preparing next year to launch a program — tentatively called Eureka — that will allow workers across the defense contractor's large network of locations to connect with each other and talk about work. Before that happens, Bethesda-based Lockheed Martin also plans to make the computer programming code...

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