The easy way to Enterprise 2.0

While I was enjoying the sunny Saturday in San Francisco, my feed reader filled up several points to Euan Semple's post, "The 100% guaranteed easiest way to do Enterprise 2.0?"

Enterprise 2.0 is not just the idea of employing blogs, wikis, collective intelligence, social networking, tagging, RSS, AJAX, presence and other technologies and Web-related concepts in a corporate setting. It connecting with the younger workforce that grew up on the Web and the older workforce who grew into the Web, understanding the powers of collaboration, communication, flattened hierarchies and knowledge access brought by the Internet. 

Semple boils it down to three principles: Do nothing, get out of the way and keep the energy levels up. He encourages companies to unleash and engage with the people energized to explore Web 2.0 tools and to open the way for them to do so inside the firewall (get out of the way) as a path to benefiting from Enterprise 2.0. It's the getting out of the way part that will give CIOs and IT departments headaches. 

As Don Tapscott has pointed out, based on his research, the 80 million Net generation young adults coming into the workplace will want to be part of an engage and collaborate model rather than command and control.  This will require a paradigm shift that “involves dislocation, conflict, confusion and uncertainty," Tapscott said. "New paradigms are nearly always received with coolness, even mockery and hostility. Those with vested interests will fight change, and the shift demands such a different view to things that established leaders are often the last to be won over.”