Objectives of knowledge management

participation and 
interaction of customers 
in rating, selecting and 
buying products through 
group buying. This 
participation can occur on 
an e‑commerce site or on 
third‑ party sites.
Digital business 
(digital business)
How businesses apply 
digital technology and 
media to improve the 
competitiveness of their 
organisation through 
optimising internal 
processes with online and 
traditional channels to 
market and supply.
Intranet
A private network within 
a single company using 
Internet standards 
to enable employees 
to access and share 
information using web 
publishing technology.
Enterprise social 
media software
Systems used inside 
organisations to enable 
real‑ time collaboration 
between employees 
and other stakeholders 
such as customers and 
suppliers to support 
business processes 
such as customer 
service, supply chain 
management and new 
product development. 
Collectively these tools 
are sometimes referenced 
as Enterprise 2.0.
Figure 1.5
The relationship between intranets, extranets and the Internet
Internet
Marketing
Extranet
Marketing / purchasing
Intranet
IT Dept
Intranet
Company
only
The
world
Suppliers,
customers,
collaborators
Suppliers,
customers,
collaborators
The
world
Extranet
The Internet
Mini Case Study 1.2
The Suncorp financial services group manages 25 brands in Australia and New Zealand spanning banking, 
insurance, investment and superannuation. Suncorp has over 219,000 shareholders, over 16,000 employees 
and around 7 million customers.
Suncorp has used enterprise social networking tool Yammer to help geographically dispersed people 
and teams to connect, share, discuss and innovate. It has also helped Suncorp create a culture where col‑
laboration is more natural by enabling people to interact online in an open, informal and transparent way. 
Suncorp implement an internal social network
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16
Part 1
Introduction
Within a matter of months, Yammer membership grew from a handful of early adopters to over 1,700 users 
and continues to grow.
Jeff Smith, Suncorp, the Chief Information Office of Yammer, explains the benefits as follows:
Yammer has enabled us to harness the wisdom of our people who are spread across multiple teams, geog‑
raphies and brands to help achieve our purpose of delivering business solutions for competitive advantage.
Brian Robbins, Chief Marketing Office (CMO), added:
We recently signed up for Yammer and are seeing it spread virally among our employees. It is helping 
us accelerate collaboration and internal communications across our 20,000 employees in 300 offices in 
30 countries. We’re seeing all kinds of serendipitous connections across projects, cultures and time zones.
The benefits of applying a tool like Yammer to Suncorp can be summarised as:
● 
Increased informal knowledge flow across the organisation through microblogging.
● 
Overcome barriers to collaboration, providing instant connection for people, teams, informal networks, 
communities of practice and other shared interest groups.
● 
Improved alignment between executives and employees by use of broadcast message to communicate 
messages and quickly crowdsource to get ideas, suggestions and answers to questions.
● 
Helped stimulate greater sharing and discussion amongst common role groups, e.g. developers, architects 
and testers.
Source
: Adapted from Yammer (2010).
Figure 1.6
Yammer Enterprise social media tool (www.yammer.com)
Source
: www.yammer.com.
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Chapter 1
Introduction to digital business and e‑commerce
If access to an organisation’s web services is extended to some others, but not everyone 
beyond the organisation, this is an 
extranet
. Whenever you log on to an Internet service 
such as that for an e-retailer or online news site, this is effectively an extranet arrangement, 
although the term is most often used to mean a business-to-business application such as the 
Shell SIMON capability described in Case Study 6.1 where certain customers or suppliers are 
given shared access. We look at examples of intranets and extranets in Chapter 3, including 
the Dell Premier extranet.