In truth, it’s no different from the intelligence systems evolution afoot among businesses to create ecosystems of shared knowledge and experience to see more clearly the risks and rewards a marketplace has to offer. Even as intelligence in business had its roots in national intelligence work, national intelligence is on the bleeding edge of adoption of Enterprise 2.0 applications for business.

Your archives define the philosophy of your blog: “We are struggling to give substance to Enterprise 2.0. We know we are struggling. Something will emerge from the struggle.” I would like to progress a constructive question: Why are we struggling? Drucker foresaw the struggle in 1991 in his ‘Managing For The Future’:
“Capital cannot be substituted for people in knowledge and service work. Nor does new technology by itself generate higher productivity in such work. In making and moving things, capital and technology are factors of production. In knowledge and service work they are tools of production. Whether they help productivity or harm it depends on what people do with them, on the purpose to which they are being put, for instance, or on the skill of the user………….In knowledge and service work, partnership with the responsible worker is the only way; nothing else will work at all.”

It follows that so long as the assumption ‘IT is a tool’ applies we shall carry on struggling and superior enterprise performance with IT will remain a tantalizing vision reminiscent of the twelve blind men trying to visualize the elephant by touching and feeling.

It is simple enough to go beyond the critical assumption of ‘IT is a tool’ in theory even if the means has yet to emerge: IT will organize, channel and drive knowledge flows independent of people support. Its impact will be:
-Fostering habit formation to induce a knowledge driven culture instead of dependence upon one.
-More lively natural flows resulting in superior judgments, with systematic conduct and capture of ALL knowledge flows
-A collective intelligence that is aware of the past and can be focused on the present per the need for taking concerted action.

Even this limited projection is far removed from the expressed desire of Enterprise 2.0:
“Enterprise 2.0 – or, if you prefer, the concept of the real-time, inter-personal, proactive, truly customer-focused enterprise enabled by the best services-based software technologies available today Â….”

The projection is also real time but is thereafter team based. Its virtual space gives each person the power of the team for progressing action. By suitably guiding the flows in context, the thought that precedes action can be channeled. In brief, the projection envisages an intelligent enterprise virtual space or EVS for short. The nature of intelligence is different from the cumulative intelligence delivered by the search engines of the Web Virtual Space (WVS) but conceptually they both are collective. The WVS is the reason we are reaching out for the EVS.

A reliable means for success, viz., pursuit of excellence, superior execution, overcoming a culture for mistakes, collective intelligence, etc., will follow from an intelligent EVS.

Today the EVS is populated in a limited way by project flows: Limited because they are confined to rigid loops and groups and emphasize progress of action rather than emergence of opinion. Thus for all practical purposes the EVS is virgin. I would say the real purpose of the drive for Enterprise 2.0 is to somehow overcome DruckerÂ’s critical assumption and transform IT into intelligent energy for developing the EVS, independent of personnel volition. Is it necessary to first agree on the approach? The real demand is for a meaningful virtual space and not the tools.

Thank you for your post on “Required Reading”. In light of its contents the need for feedback on deployment of the Enterprise 2.0 toolkit can perhaps be more specific: What is the practice adopted to achieve critical mass in context of the enterprise profile and what are the results achieved?