Who 2 E2

Beginning in 2005 General Motors began watching the emerging technology of Web 2.0 in search of potential competitive advantages.  They’ve since found some of those advantages by implementing blogs and internal wikis.  Their successful and popular customer facing blogs are frequently cited in Enterprise 2.0 articles.  Fred Killeen, Chief Systems and Technology officer at GM, is convinced that these and other Web 2.0 tools will lead to significant positive changes for companies and says “Web 2.0 will drive change in the way companies do things”.

General Motors is the largest automaker with more than 300,000 employees operating in over 70 countries. 

Usage

• Wikis  “A lot of the collaborative work that goes on amongst project teams has really benefited from the use of wikis and discussion forums; the ability to have people interact much more quickly, much more immediately on the web has been very powerful for us.”, Fred Killeen
• Customer facing blogs  “We know that we’re competitive with any truck or car company in the world in terms of quality and durability and design, but we felt that message wasn’t really being communicated very well to people outside of GM. As we looked at how we could help change that perception, we felt that blogs were the right way to develop better interactivity with the customers and really communicate our message better.”, Bill Betts, GM Customer Communication Manager
• Exploring mashups
• Exploring folksonomies and tagging

Advantages

• Real-time collaboration around the world & across time zones
• Developing a common sense of terminology and language across the company
• “they don’t have to e-mail Powerpoint presentations or Word documents to each other in order to share ideas; instead, they can just start a wiki” (Killeen)
• “you don’t need to be a technical expert to post the content” (Killeen)”
• “there’s great potential for changing the way we do a lot of things, from how we engage our users, to how we develop systems, to how we interact with our customers, right through to how we collaborate together in order to design and develop better cars and trucks.” (Killeen)

Approach / Advice

“do some pilots, and through those pilots understand how it changes the work and how it impacts the users and what you need to do from a change management standpoint. The thing that makes this technology great is that it’s reasonably simple yet allows you to exploit a whole host of capabilities.” (Killeeen)

Who Says

• Business Management, The dawn of Enterprise 2.0, February 2007
• ComputerWeekly, Drive business change with Web 2.0,  Nov 7, 2006
• KPMG, “Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future?”, 2007