Jason Hiner has some interesting posts on TechRepublic on the subject of “Enterprise 2.0”. This is largely reproduced with edits, for my own benefit !
Harvard professor Andrew McAfee (left) is credited with coining the phrase “Enterprise 2.0? — which is basically Web 2.0 for businesses .
He previously viewed blogs as a medium for teenagers to journal about meaningless ramblings. Now, he relies on blogs on a daily basis. “I think the blogosphere is my single most valuable source of information… I’m amazed at the non-patheticness [of it]”.
McAfee asserted that many of the tools in the Enterprise 2.0 toolbox are aimed at replacing e-mail but noted that it will be difficult to unseat e-mail in many organizations because it is so ingrained. “We tend to overweight the value of our incumbent technologies,” he said.
The core of Enterprise 2.0
The collaboration tools of Enterprise 2.0 are not about replacing e-mail as much as they are about allowing e-mail to simply be a messaging platform and not a collaboration platform. Right now in most organizations, e-mail is the primary means for sharing and collaborating on files and doing group-think for geographically dispersed groups. However, e-mail was never designed for those functions and is not very good at them.
Enterprise 2.0 tools are about making collaboration more efficient and effective by providing better ways for groups (either standard teams or groups gathered for a short-term project) to share and edit files in real time with full version tracking and easier replication/transfer. Plus, the groups need communication tools like IM, forums, comments, Wikis, shared whiteboards, and/or VoIP to collaborate because e-mail quickly becomes cluttered and difficult to track when multiple people jump into a thread.
The next great battleground
Both startups and established tech companies have realized the potential for improving productivity with Enterprise 2.0 tools, so there’s an all-out race to create a great collaboration platform that will gain critical mass.
Every company is taking a slightly different approach to building a collaboration platform, often based on their strengths with previous products. Some are approaching it from the angle of an intranet portal, while others try to do it with an SaaS (Software as a service) platform that they host. Still others are doing it with a distributed approach using fat client P2P-based software.
Microsoft has a head start with two different approaches: SharePoint (portal) and Groove (fat client). IBM is using WebSphere to make its collaboration play and is also developing middleware for mashups to help fuel other platforms. However, the most interesting work is coming from the startups.
Zoho has built best-of-breed online office apps and threaded in collaboration features from the ground up. ThinkFree (right) has reverse-engineered Microsoft Office file formats and done a better job than Microsoft of creating a business-ready portal for collaborating on them. Collanos has built a peer-to-peer collaboration workspace that is probably easier to use than any of the other platforms.
Knowledge Management, Collaboration & Sharing 
Hi Peter – Interesting thoughts on the tools of collaboration in the enterprise – I agree, we’re heading into a very interesting time of “non-patheticness” and growth.
I find, however, that the tools of collaboration in the enterprise are not always the biggest hurdles. Choosing your favorite blog server, or wiki solution, can take weeks, but getting the legal framework or governance program in place for that collaboration can take months or even years at some large enterprises. Maybe we’re also heading into a time when we need to be thinking about and talking about the rules of collaboration as much as the tools of collaboration.
What do you think?
By: Aaron Williams on June 15, 2008
at 5:36 pm
That’s true for those enterprises that make their collaboration tools publicly available. However, I think that we’re much more likely to see widespread adoption of enterprise collaboration behind company firewalls.
By: Peter on June 16, 2008
at 8:19 pm