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However, increasing evidence abounds that Enterprise 2.0 adoption has begun in earnest with a typical example being Wells Fargo taking the plunge,
having rolled out Enterprise 2.0 platforms to 160,000 workers. It has
become clear that we’re moving out of the early pioneer phase to a
broader acceptance phase. From the production side, a brand new analysis
indicates that the business social software market will be nearly $1
billion strong this year and over $3.3 billion by 2011. In these and
other ways, such as the growing collection of success stories, Enterprise 2.0 has arrived.

The big question for many of those on the fence now is: 1) Do we now
have the right capabilities in terms of ready Enterprise 2.0 products?
And 2) Do we generally understand how to apply them properly to obtain
good returns on our investment in them? Knowing the answers to both
questions will almost certainly tell us if we’re ready for mainstream
adoption of adoption of Enterprise 2.0 any time soon.

Did the original articulation of Enterprise 2.0 have the right focus
and point us in the best direction? And has the conception of it
evolved from this vision to reflect that which we’ve learned along the
way? Going back again to our two questions that will inform us as to
the state of Enterprise 2.0; what have learned from our
experiences with the early platforms and initial rollouts of Enterprise
2.0 and what does it teach us?

The state of Enterprise 2.0 - Fall 2007

• Enterprise 2.0 is going to happen in your organization with you or without you

• Effective Enterprise 2.0 seems to involve more than just blogs and wikis

• Enterprise 2.0 is more a state of mind than a product you can purchase

• Most businesses still need to educate their workers on the techniques and best practices of Enterprise 2.0 and social media

• The benefits of Enterprise 2.0 can be dramatic, but only builds steadily over time

• Enterprise 2.0 doesn’t seem to put older IT systems out of business

• Your organization will begin to change in new ways because of Enterprise 2.0. Be ready

Web 2.0 in the enterprise: Strategic or tactical?

For many managers and workers however, these great and historical
shifts are beyond their scope or mandate, and they just want
incremental improvements to their area of the business and avoid
obsolescence. In fact, this is currently one of the more sustained and
germane aspects of Web 2.0 for most businesses in the short term and is
an important part of Web 2.0 in the enterprise story. Most
organizations will be focusing on tactical experiments and pilot
efforts as they begin to dabble with Web 2.0 and see how they can apply
it to their local corporate culture and unique business situations. But
whether one is looking at completely transforming a business at a
strategic level, or just applying a few Web 2.0 techniques to a corner
of a business that can benefit from it, the message is clearer and
clearer business leaders: Significant change is afoot and now is the
time to start looking hard at how to embrace it.

The aspects of Web 2.0 in the enterprise as of mid-2007

We’ll now do a brief clock-wise tour of the key aspects of Web 2.0
the enterprise as presented above. The four quadrants of the
visualization divide the world of enterprise Web 2.0 into social and technical halves vertically and external and internal halves
horizontally. There are certainly other ways to divide the concerns of
Web 2.0 but this method is good for several reasons. One is that the
social dimension of Web 2.0 is often underappreciated in IT circles (my
experience) and calling it out at top conveys both the change in focus
for IT and how important it is from a business perspective. The second
is that aforementioned bright line that presently exists between
internal IT solutions and external offerings. These have very different
contexts and while the same Web 2.0 platforms can often serve both,
they are provisioned and used very differently right down to what
filters and controls are applied.

Getting good business outcomes from social media while managing downside

To test the point, I put the well-regarded Google Docs against the new Enterprise 2.0 checklist I discussed recently in The State of Enterprise 2.0,
a checklist which I’ve called FLATNESSES. This mnemonic contains the
key capabilities and properties of Enterprise 2.0 applications and I
was surprised at how close Google Docs came to the mark. While missing tagging and extensions and having poor support for things like Web widgets (which gave it the gray checkmark on freeform), Google Docs is actually a fairly good Enterprise 2.0 citizen with extremely powerful search capabilities, zero barriers to authorship
and collaboration (anyone in the world can, for free, create a document
in minutes and start working together in real-time with their
colleagues around the world ), and most of the other things we’d expect
from a competent Enterprise 2.0 platform.

Google documents can even be made 100% public and globally visible
across the Web with the click of a button. Even RSS feeds and e-mail
notifications ensures that network-based information consumption is
manageable and gives it a green checkmark on signals, a key
component of Enterprise 2.0. In the end, Google Docs is not fully as
robust as a wiki in some ways, but it’s pretty close.