Enterprise 2.0 Wrapup

Supernova Staff | June 26th, 2009 | Strategic Change

The Enterprise 2.0 conference has wrapped, and the consensus seems to be that 2009 is the transitional year for the movement of “Web 2.0″ concepts into the enterprise.

Paul Greenberg writes:

“Enterprise 2.0 so far has been an eyeopener because its telling me and around 1200-1300 others that there is not only a lot of cool and collaborative things going on but E2.0 is moving into mainstream thinking and soon into mainstream operations, systems, and best of all strategy…if you are a business person and you want to understand what you have to do in the next year to 2 years — this is it.”

Oliver Marks chimes in as well:

“Enterprise 2.0 was not well understood as a concept this time last year in most circles; twelve months on and many enterprise vendors have absorbed the core concepts, if not always the actual experiential benefits, into their offerings…While it’s great that there is now widespread understanding of the concepts of Enterprise 2.0, I find it is still an uphill battle to get people to understand the experiential side. There are plenty of people and companies who talk around the concepts without actually using them.”

And Alexander Wolfe from InformationWeek brings it home:

“I’m encouraged that the dirty little secret of Web 2.0 and social media technologies is finally being openly addressed by early adopters and vendors alike. At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, there’s been frank discussion this week of the question average users have been whispering (so that their bosses don’t hear them): Namely, what can this stuff do for me that’s actually useful?

In truth, though, the answers to that question are not yet completely apparent. Here’s the deal. At last year’s conference, most denizens of the Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 community were consumed with evangelism issues. There was a need to raise the profile of wikis, collaborative tools, social-messaging platforms – all the stuff that early adopters were already down with, but average corporate users, not so much.

This year, we’ve passed through the familiarity hurdle. We’ve all been wiki’ed up and Twitterized. The problem is, those who don’t have an innate feel for the technology, or whose jobs don’t make amorphous, asynchronous communications networks useful, have been left out of the cold”

There’s a lot more coverage of the conference here.  But the question that I’d like to raise is — for your organization or agency, is this “2.0″ stuff evolving to be tools that are used in the “real” world?  Or is it still only the bailiwick of the early adopters?