Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 takes the original concept of the Web, using websites to feed content to visitors, and turns it upside down. Instead of a one-way conversation-your company talking to the site visitor-Enterprise 2.0 lets you implement a multiparty conversation to share information and manage knowledge inside and outside the organization using blogs and wikis, social networking and tagging, rating systems and the like. The link among these tools is the ability of the individuals involved to participate and to control the process while they work together, share information and create networks of people with similar interests.

Tools to enable these functions have existed for a long time. The trouble is that few people used them, despite large amounts of resources expended to deploy these systems. What changed is the simplicity of the tools. If they're simpler, they're more likely to be used, an important component for knowledge management. (That is, nobody had an incentive to share information, particularly when doing so was a pain.)

This gives new hope to the idea of managing knowledge and sharing information, a goal that goes back to the 1990s when vendors began developing knowledge management and content management solutions. Instead of trying to implement huge, all-encompassing enterprisewide systems, the simpler Web-based tools under the Enterprise 2.0 umbrella strip away the complexity of the '90s technologies while carrying on the spirit of the ideas.

The fact is, Enterprise 2.0 concepts are gaining credibility, and it's not just startups that are paying attention to this space. More than 800 people attended the recent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, which included speakers from IBM, Microsoft and Cisco, and a host of other smaller players. IBM introduced the Web 2.0 Goes to Work package for the WebSphere Portal, while Microsoft promoted Sharepoint, a natural collaboration environment, as a way to implement Enterprise 2.0 ideas along with Office and other Microsoft technologies.