Richard MacManus reports on some of the developments around Enterprise 2.0, the application of some Web 2.0 technologies and approaches to big business. There’s some debate over whether Web 2.0 is a pure consumer phenomenon and that therefore Enterprise 2.0 is a different animal.

I don’t think it is.

While many of the poster children of Web 2.0 are resolutely consumer – digg, youtube, myspace, wikipedia – their approach, and the 2.0 approach generally is about making things better for users, harnessing their input and aggregating them in clever ways. There’s nothing intrinsic to this agenda that segregates it from the business world. What’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.

Users are not just your customers, they are also you and your fellow employees. Practices, tools and technologies which make life better for users are good for everyone. The separation between consumer and business applications is, in some senses, artificial.

If RSS makes it easy for consumers to read their favourite publications, then it is just as easy for employees to pick up the latest company information anywhere, on any device without logging into the intranet. If AJAX allows for more compelling, smoother and more immediate results for website customers then the same might be true of your CRM database. If mash-ups allowing the combination of maps and house prices work well for consumers, then mash-ups that bring together information from sales, accounts and marketing databases into a centralised overview are equally good news for managers.

The Wisdom of Crowds approach, for example, is not one that would typically be associated with multinational businesses. However, as I’ve noted before, corporations are already waking up to the idea that decisions and information can be better with input from a wider range of sources than the board room. Google, Microsoft and Eli-Lilly already use prediction markets as internal decision-making tools. Prediction markets are a form of stock exchange in which members might bet on the best-selling products and other strategy decisions. The belief is that if the members of the decision-making pool are autonomous, have a variety of insights and are self-interested, then their collective decision-making power will be extremely successful.

Other companies such as First Direct, BT, Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein, Mini and Nokia are using Wikis, real-time collaborative websites that can be generated and updated on-the-fly. Unlike intranets, they don’t require layers of permission and encourage employees to ‘chip-in’, correcting and expanding on other people’s knowledge. Built-in profile pages and complete documentation of all changes encourage the development of relationships between contributors and a sense of responsibility.

These are for used internal communication, to create a knowledge base or replace emails for important information. They’re also used for communications with customers, as a technical support or information tool that is co-created with users. Over 2000 organisations already use the SocialText paid-for Wiki service. Research firm Gartner predicts that Wikis will become mainstream collaboration tools in at least 50% of companies by 2009. In some companies, says SocialText, meeting times and email volume have already been cut by 50% through the use the collaborative tool.

Web 2.0 services such as CRM systems like salesforce.com or office applications like Google Spreadsheets have quite obvious business applications because they directly mimic tools that are already in use in the offline office. However, while switching to web equivalents can help cut costs, they truly become powerful to businesses with new approaches involving mobility, device agnosticism, openness, collaboration and real-time access to developing events and information.

Perhaps it’s the resistance to change that makes a new name, Enterprise 2.0, seem necessary. But perhaps what that really describes is the organisational change that needs to happen in order to get value out of any of these things, rather than the technologies themselves. For many businesses, I suspect, collaboration, lack of hierarchy, customer input and sharing are pretty foreign, scary concepts. In those cases, it’s not what sits on their computers that will be the big change.

Help spread this post:

Possibly related posts:

• Word of the Day
• Beneath the Surface
• Stock Tip: Bet on Collective Intelligence