Increasing the responsiveness of an organization using enterprise 2.0?

Faced this situation before? A propsective customer of yours wants to know some specific details of your company before taking the decision on whether your company is the right one to give the order to and you are the one they reach out. You do not have the necessary information and are not sure whom to contact to get the right information in this short period of time. Well I am sure many of us can relate to this situation. The main problem we face is that the information that is required is not available on your sales portal / website and therefore you are typically lost on where to go and whom to contact to get the right answer. You know someone one in management team will have this information but it not easy to identify who the right person is quickly and then get the response considering he/she might be travelling or attending a seminar or in a meeting or busy with some of other work. I am sure many of us in sales have faced this situation. Its situations like these where one really feels the requirement for a good KM system. A KM environment which is 24x7 and will give you the information you require in the shortest time possible. The surpise here is that most of the organizations have some KM systems in place but even then a sales person finds it difficult to get the specific information that he/she is looking for. The content at a high level might be available but if you are looking at specific details then you could be disappointed. The next option here is to start contacting the person / people who might be the designated point of contact for the information you are require. But again the probability that one gets the answer quickly is dependent on whether this person sees your e-mail or picks up your call. In some cases this person may not be in the organization and then its the information roadblock that we all dread so much. Well things are changing now. Web 2.0 tools are helping us break that barrier. The various social networking tools are increasing the channels through which one can try source the information that one requires so basically increasing the probability of finding it. So what was earlier dependent on personal connections, ability to search databases, Forums, telephone calls or even face to face meetings has more options in the form of enterprise and external web 2.0 tools, advanced video conferencing facilities, etc. This of course does not discount the need for having an overall Knowledge Management framework in place. The point that I would like to make here is that Web 2.0 tools does not replace KM in a organization but only helps improve the ways in which employees can share knowledge, increase the probability of finding what one is looking for and collaborate better. Organizations now have to take a re-look at their KM strategy and ensure they include enterprise 2.0 as an important component of this strategy. This blog post is just the beginning. Although in this blog entry, I have looked at only one problem that organizations face, I will be blogging more on how organizations can be more effective and responsive overall by implementing Entperise 2.0 technologies.