The state of Enterprise 2.0

InfoWorld and Baseline have overviews of announcements made at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston this week. It's no longer just the upstarts flogging Enterprise 2.0-- now IBM, Microsoft, SAP and other incumbents have figured out that the social, remixed Web is not a passing fad defined by MySpace and Facebook and mashup artists.

On the other hand, the broad adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies--blogs, wikis, social networks, tagging, RSS, etc.--in enterprises has been slow. Harvard Business School Asssociate Professor Andrew McAfee coined the term 'Enterprise 2.0,' but so far he has few case studies that demonstrate the triumph of the meme. But, he is optimistic that Enterprise 2.0 will have an impact on how companies work, shifting from more rigid and siloed hierarchical organizations to incorporate more democratized, egalitarian, self-organizing, freeform authoring approaches to work and collaboration.

During his Enterprise 2.0 conference keynote, McAfee characterized the state of the meme as follows: ""We're not anywhere near the end of this in any sense of the word. In particular, inside companies the most I have seen are some very sincere efforts that are dipping the corporate toe in the waters. For those who really want to harness this energy, I think some really good things await them. I don't predict that corporate America will be radically transformed by Enterprise 2.0 approaches in the next five years. That's entirely too optimistic. Will there be some companies that do some legitimately interesting things and have some fantastic successes in their markets because of these kinds of approaches? I'm fully confident that there are. What would love to start harnessing that information in one place so we can all profit from it and add to it over time."

He also came up with a report card for Enterprise 2.0:

• Awareness of Enterprise 2.0: A
• Technologies: A-
• Communicating results: C (Not enough case studies, benchmarks, stories)

I would agree on his grading, although the technologies are still evolving to be more enterprise class in terms of security, integration and compliance. Companies are deploying blogs, wikis and RSS, but not with an overall comprehensive strategy to harness the collective intelligence of employees, partners and customers.Check out the debate, which I moderated, between McAfee and Babson College Professor Thomas Davenport. Jason Wood cover the debate in this post: McAfee vs. Davenport: McAfee wins 12-rounder on points.

See also: Ross Mayfield's coverage of the panel, "How to Build an Enterprise 2.0 Platform Employees Will Use "

Younger Workers Demanding Web 2.0 Tech on the Job (InformationWeek)

Jason Hiner: Enterprise 2.0 is about building a collaboration platform that is better than e-mail

Video and audio of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference keynotes

John Eckman live blogging of the Enterprise 2.0 conference

Jevon MacDonald: I am cutting Enterprise 2.0 from my vocabulary

Michael Sampson's coverage of the Enterprise 2.0 conference