The November 2005 issue of ACM Queue is their Social Computing issue with a main article from a team at IBM who are testing social bookmarking within the enterprise.
Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise, by David Millen, Jonathan Feinberg, and Bernard Kerr, IBM
Social bookmarking tools are taking off on the Web. Do they have a place within the enterprise, too?Socially Acceptable Behavior (editorial) by Charlene O'Hanlon, ACM Queue
Social bookmarking is a technology whose time has come.
The piece from IBM covers some of the history of individual bookmarking studies and the basics of social bookmarking and why it might be interesting for internal discovery processes. Their software, called dogear, is a souped-up version of del.icio.us. Since the system is internal, they have the convenient ability to integrate with other in-house efforts, like their people databases and search engines. In navigating through bookmarks, one can link through to the profiles of the employee who created the link or other employees who have linked to an item. They also suggest that internal search results can be customized to include results from dogear. The other feature of dogear, like del.icio.us, is its extensibility. In their trials with a few hundred people, some of them have started developing their own uses for the data - exactly what they'd like to see.
In the discussion, they also recognize that different classes and groups of people are going to want to get different information out of the system. To that end, they are thinking about how to integrate (or discover) communities, roles and other aspects into the use of the system. And they want to do this in a way that doesn't get in the way of its primary functionality.
They do mention that there has to be a critical mass of participants, and one would imagine that a technology company the size of IBM should have enough mass to do something.
David Weinberger wrote about dogear a couple weeks ago, IBM shows del.icio.us for the enterprise, and more.