I purchased your white paper this afternoon…very interesting reading.

I work on the ‘other side of the fence’, I am in IT and I am having difficulty de-conflicting the needs of the enterprise vs. the needs of the user when it comes to the ideas presented by Enterprise 2.0.

I love the concept of empowering users; but at the same time have to face the realities of regulatory impact on the enterprise. I have blogged these thoughts, commented on Guy Kawasaki’s blog article on CogHead, and commented on Rod Boothby’s blog as well. Basically all three thoughts are around the same issue…user freedom vs corporate control.

I would really appreciate your comments on this frustration I am experiencing.

No one should be surprised by this. Web 2.0 covers a variety of technological, process, and cultural changes. It’s a complex area requiring an understanding of different marketing and adoptions strategies targeted at different market segments and different “communities of practice.” Given this complexity it’s not surprising that the research methods being applied in studying Web 2.0 are more akin to clinical reporting and case studies than controlled experiments; there are just too many variables to control. Marketplace adoption is where truth will be told, and the jury is still out.

A telling point will be how hard Microsoft pushes the various collaborative and social networking oriented products it is developing and testing in parallel with Sharepoint Server 2007. I was surprised to hear at the New New Internet Conference in Northern Virginia (where Professor McAfee spoke, among others) that internally Microsoft is referring to Knowledge Network and related products as “edge” products, a term developed by Microsoft’s marketing team in reference to the complex nature of the adoption process for these new products.

Microsoft may believe that adoption of new collaborative and social networking oriented tools is going to take a very long time. Whatever you think of Microsoft’s technology and business strategy, internally they themselves have adopted collaborative tools quite aggressively. Whether or not Microsoft believes that such tools will have a big market and rapid adoption among corporate users, where “knowledge management” is less of a focus than getting “business as usual” done, is still an open question.

1. Technology is adopted over time in a bell-curve shape with technology enthusiasts the first to jump onto a new technology, and the laggards the last.

2. Technology enhusiasts (the Irregulaors and the Techcrunch crowd) and early adopters will jump to a new technology to gain an edge. They’ll live with the bugs, workaround issues and don’t worry about referencability etc.

Problem is, it’s a pretty small market. So, you really need to appeal to the pragmist early majority market who prefer to follow-the-herd and use proven technologies, buy from the recognized market leader and want a 100% solution: support, services, referencability, etc.

Problem is, technology enthusiasts don’t make good references for these pragmatists. The way to appeal to them is to pick a line-of-business problem that is causing pragmatists so-much-pain that they are willing to break from the herd.

Andy – I think your model for 9x more productive is correct here (during my time at a VC we pretty much disregarded anything as a disruptive-technology unless it has a 10-time improvement over the status-quo)

So, in short, I think that wikis etc. CANNOT jump straight to mainstream. They must win their market-share in NICHE areas to prove their value and cross the chasm between early adopters and the mass market. From there, they can stretch out into other areas and maybe, over time, play across the entire enterprise.

Good luck to you all!

Nevertheless people didn’t use it. I thought they saw it so geek or boring, without categories and rules, so they didn’t know how start to participate. We made instructions who nobody read, metodologies who nobody applied. This trouble seems to be so human.

Therefore, in my humble opinion, the question must to be “How transform a geek technnology tool in a friendly no-geek social tool?” or “Will the McAfee’s six components (SLATES) be enough to achieve it?”

Those with the time to wade through the growing list of companies trying to address various business process/production issues will, no doubt, find some fantastic tools that can be put together into a meaningful advantage in terms of efficiency/efficacy of their teams. But, for mere mortals who generally feel the need to attend “training” to adopt a new technology, it seems a tough sell to pick out one of the dozens of choices for any particular problem (OK, so dozens is in many cases exaggerated, but it’s starting to get to that point) and run with it.

The all-too-often notion of “antibodies” inside of a corporation plays out well here — you might see enlightened teams take up particular tools for particular purposes, but therein lies the challenge to build a “big” business around selling these tools — you’ll need to find a way to get sales leverage in order execute a bottom-up strategy, and that’s a tough nut to crack. Not impossible, to be sure, but the point is that having a tool or suite of tools that has a 9X improvement is only the beginning of making a real business in this space. There’s a reason, after all, that we saw an evolution away from “Best of Breed” and towards the mega-suites with “Good Enough” tools. On the other hand, I agree that one of the biggest real trends in “Enterprise 2.0″ is selling to the people who use software rather than to those who maintain it. I think, though, that transition will take many years longer than those making bets in this space today would like (of course, that mismatch of investment to market maturation time is all too common in venture).

Perhaps there will be a new category of consultancies that emerge to help organizations make sense of the dizzying number of new choices in software/services — if the Enterprise 2.0 folks can come along and disrupt the traditional enterprise software vendors, perhaps this new breed of consultancy can disrupt the large SI shops too…

In general, I am optimistic about the technologies you mentioned. But I think the ‘enterprise’ itself is the issue. The average organisation doesn’t really want ad hoc computing initiatives and it will be even more averse to substantial cultural change, which the less enlightened will regard as ‘subversion’.

Communities of Practice strike me as the obvious social software bridgehead into organisations. They have already undergone the cultural readjustment to adopt this stuff. If management see the benefits, they may be more receptive to wider adoption.

I have started many wikis and, I think because of their inherent ‘geekiness’ and the low numbers of participants, they have not become anywhere near as active as I had hoped. Mostly they comprised me seeding useful information, getting the odd contribution back, then a taper into indifference.

This could, of course, have been the result of discovering that the projects were unworthy of pursuit anyway. In which case, job done. (In actual fact, mail lists stimulated the participants far more, even though it became a nightmare to keep track and draw the threads together.)

Using wikis requires effort and incorporation into work habits, therefore the promised rewards need to balance this effort. Using a wiki requires more discipline than, say, email, blogging, RSS and using an aggregator.

Your “9x” sounds like a headline-grabbing soundbite (I am a journalist some of the time) but I think while the number may be unsubstantiable, the principle is correct.

Finally, while Ismael has done a brilliant job of putting together the Office 2.0 conference, I would not hold up the wiki as a major component of its success. The Irregulars have tried (on and off) to collaborate in the wiki, but we always seem to revert to Google Groups and, if I’m anything to go by, receive and respond through email rather than Google itself.

Having said this, I have attended two LesBlogs events in Paris in which Loic Le Meur made the SocialText wiki the hub of the pre-event activity, from getting speakers and attendees, through publicity, to making social arrangements with ‘birds of a feather’.

I work for a software start-up in the process of launching a wiki-driven product management process and a wiki-driven intranet.

The product management side is a no-brainer – there are only a few participants using the wiki for a very specific purpose. Thus, heavy collaboration and much utility.

The intranet side is dicier. I suspect that we – and other enterprises dipping their toes in the 2.0 waters – will have difficulty assigning roles and managing content in a free form “2.0″ environment. Who can edit what? Who is the final authority?

Which begs the larger question – is an enterprise wiki with only a handful of “approved” contributors and a “final authority” truly a wiki? Or just a content mgmt system with cachet?