When I spoke at KMWorld07 in Silicon Valley last month, I sat in on the presentation made by Charles Armstrong of Trampoline Systems. One of the interesting points he made is that Web 2.0 is the first set of technologies that have been developed in the consumer space before being taken into enterprise use. All other major information technologies have first been developed and used in large organizations before being adapted for consumer use, not least by becoming accessible on price.

I’ve often observed that Enterprise 2.0 initiatives largely stem from executives seeing their children using sites like Facebook, Wikipedia, del.icio.us, Digg, YouTube or Remember the Milk, and thinking, “Hmm, I can see that kind of tool being useful inside my organization.”

It is very useful to think of it specifically as that issue: adapting consumer tools and software to be useful inside organizations.

One obvious issue is that of scale. As I point out in my Web 2.0 Framework, one of the key aspects of Web 2.0 is that it “collectively transforms mass participation into valuable outcomes.” In the case of the open consumer web, that mass participation can amount to literally hundreds of millions of people. Organizations at the most have hundreds of thousands, and often far fewer people. This means there are a range of issues in effectively scaling Web 2.0 applications to be valuable inside organizations. However the other side of that is that far more detailed information is available on workers inside companies, including their current projects, training background, work objectives and more, all of which means that aggregating information can be far more usefully applied than in the open web.

Building on the theme of adapting Web 2.0 technologies to be valuable inside organizations, Network Computing has recently published a very good piece titled Can Web 2.0 evolve into an Enterprise Technology? It’s well worth a read. Some of the points it raises:

* Since Web 2.0 gives power to users, it can reduce IT staffing levels. Nutritional products firm Shaklee has reduced IT staff by 20%. It is a significant change issue to have IT staff support these shifts.

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There was a good article in The Australian on Tuesday titled Taking residence in virtual worlds, which looked at what some of Australia’s leading companies are doing with Web 2.0 technologies. It quoted me:

“Almost all major Australian organisations have put this on their radar and begun trials,” Future Exploration Network chairman Ross Dawson says.

“Next year is when this will be a standard approach or framework to look at how organisations shift information architecture. In most cases it’s not a question of taking out existing tech but using complementary systems.”

I have spent much of the last month or so speaking to Australia’s leading companies, technology journalists, and thought leaders in the field in order to uncover the best examples of Enterprise 2.0 in Australia to showcase at Future Exploration Network’s Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum on 19 February 2008 in Sydney. More on what I have uncovered and the event itself shortly – there are many very exciting developments on the forum to share.

Certainly what I have found is that just about every major organization has at least a toe in the Enterprise 2.0 waters at least somewhere within the folds of its operations. One innovator in one of Australia’s largest organizations, with a larger international than domestic presence, told me of a number of interesting initiatives in one of its business units, then said, “but of course we’d be forced to shut it down if the senior executives found out about it.” In other cases initiatives are not deliberately hidden from executives, but they receive no support. However a good proportion of organizations are engaging in officially sanctioned pilots of wikis or blogs, taking steps to make social networking useful, or using other social media tools. The majority are pretty early stage, and not experiments they care to share externally. However we are getting to the point at which there are solid examples of corporates getting real value from Enterprise 2.0 approaches.

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A quick review of Day One of IIR’s Enterprise 2.0 conference. After my opening keynote, including my six lessons on Enterprise 2.0, Steve Hodgkinson of Ovum addressed the question, ‘Does Your Organisation Need Enterprise 2.0?’ One of the great examples he used is fixmystreet.com, which allows individuals to submit work orders to their local council to fix things. While this is just a website someone has set up, councils are actively responding to the requests. Or at least some are, and it’s easy to find which councils are and aren’t responding to their constituents’ complaints. Steve also presented a useful framework on the relevance of Enterprise 2.0 to organizations, as below, which comes from an interesting Ovum report on Enterprise 2.0.

Factors that influence the extent to which an organization will need, or value, enterprise 2.0

Nigel Watson of Microsoft described the history of blogging at Microsoft, from the early days through to the breadth of blogging across the enterprise that there is today. While I’m familiar with the history, it was good to hear it again. I didn’t realize that Microsoft doesn’t have an explicit blogging policy, and that Microsoft’s general employee policies are seen as sufficient. One of Microsoft’s interesting internal social media channels is Academy Mobile, which uses mobile delivery for its online learning content.

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