Not forgetting Enterprise 2.0 ...

Whilst I've done a few political posts recently, and between the Pope and Lebanon there have been enough reasons to, I am still actually very interested in Web 2.0 and it's application to the corporate environment, identified as Enterprise 2.0 by people like Andrew McAfee. There has been a lot of discussion about the Wikipedia entry for that term (see here, here and here). Dion Hinchcliffe weighs in with his parable about Web 2.0, including pretty pictures:



But amongst the techies I know the discussion is more focused on the impact Web 2.0 has on their toolbox, than on some concrete new type of service or function. The term is in some ways a joke, and even technical people are falling behind when it comes to blogs, RSS and keeping on top of technology. The problem is that Web 2.0 as a concept speaks more clearly to entrepreneurs building new web-based businesses than to tech-heads in large corporations.

I've long said that Enterprise 2.0 adoption will be driven by the business users bringing their personal productivity tools into the enterprise - and I still think this is true - but at some point it must break into the awareness of business executives that there is a competitive advantage to be had, otherwise it ekes out an existence inside the firewall on the scraps that corporate IT allows it.