Conference Examines the State of 'Enterprise 2.0'

The left-coast version of the Enterprise 2.0 conference kicked off at the Moscone Center in San Francisco this week. Even in the early going, a few key themes are starting to emerge that reflect the growing maturity of the field and the hard-learned lessons of practitioners:

1) Mainstream enterprises are coming to grips with E2.0. Keynoter Tammy Erickson, of social and collaboration software firm nGenera, called 2009 the "Year of the Aha!" in terms of social computing breaking into the consciousness of business decision-makers. She said her clients have been revising initial opinions about social computing being a shiny toy for GenY workers, or a discretionary investment like day care or a fitness center.

Another keynoter, Andrew McAfee of MIT's Sloan School of Management, warned that E2.0 evangelists now run the risk of "snatching defeat from the jaws of victory" by continuing to push the old early-adopter arguments like "E.20 will destroy the old organizational model!" or "Social computing will replace email!" These are signs that the discussion has moved to a new stage.

2) Expectations have come down to earth. McAfee's list of "worst practices" for would-be E2.0 evangelists was one of the best-received items of the morning session, partly because it rang so true. When social computing was shiny, new, scary, and mysterious, it was possible to make all kinds of claims about its risks and benefits. Now that many organizations, and most consumers, have gotten their hands dirty with the actual products, the winning business cases for adoption are more reality-based and centered on day-to-day workplace scenarios, rather than sweeping claims of transformation.

3) Social computing technology is becoming a commodity. The core set of social capabilities is now pretty firmly established in the minds of enterprise decision-makers: social networking (profile creation, news feed, status updates, etc.), collaborative content (blogs, wikis, tagging, and markup), and a set of connections to existing security, collaboration, and content-creation tools. Going forward, ordinary business and IT considerations, such as cost of ownership, reputation of the vendor, manageability, and integration, will play a dominant role in purchasing decisions, instead of killer features and capabilities. This is part of E2.0's journey from bleeding edge to mainstream IT. It's also why news about the SharePoint 2010 release is weighing so heavily on the minds of both customers and competitors.

4) Adoption depends on cultural change. E2.0 evangelists have been saying this from the beginning, but there are signs that people are finally starting to believe it. Mike Gotta from the Burton Group ran an extremely informative workshop on Monday afternoon, reviewing deployment and adoption best practices. Almost all were culture- and management-centric, not technical. Success stories from the keynote podium all identified a core shift in the organization's view of its own mission and culture as the starting point of success.

McAfee cited the example of the CIA, which changed its view of collaboration from a "restricted to need-to-know" culture when it realized that the lack of collaboration and coordination can cost lives. Few businesses had a wake-up call as dramatic as 9/11, but the economic downturn has helped clarify the situation. The well-known E2.0 success stories -- Ford, Proctor and Gamble, Best Buy -- are also among the few economic success stories in the wake of the recession, and their success, say the E2.0 gurus, comes down to culture, not just a smart technology investment strategy.

The exhibit hall is about to open to the public, and the vendors will be plying their wares. It will be interesting to see how -- or if -- the big E2.0 technology companies and their ecosystem of partners have internalized this change in the customer mindset.

— Rob Salkowitz is the author of Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap (2008) and co-author of Listening to the Future (2009). His next book is Young World Rising: How Youth, Technology and Entrepreneurship Are Transforming the Global Economy.