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Get ready for a new acronym (or is it a mnemonic?): SLATES. It’s used to describe the building blocks of Enterprise 2.0 applications. The expanded, expensive report based on Tim O’Reilly’s What Is Web 2.0? essay introduces some new ideas around the subject (free excerpt here).

But what is SLATES?* According to Dion Hinchcliffe, it’s this:

SLATES describes the combined use of effective enterprise search and discovery, using links to connect information together into a meaningful information ecosystem using the model of the Web, providing low-barrier social tools for public authorship of enterprise content, tags to let users create emergent organizational structure, extensions to spontaneously provide intelligent content suggestions similar to Amazon’s recommendation system, and signals to let users know when enterprise information they care about has been published or updated, such as when a corporate RSS feed of interest changes.

So it’s the kind of things that we’re used to from blogs, wikis, del.icio.us and flickr, applied to workers in a corporate environment. These also fall under the umbrella term Network IT, IT that’s devoted to facilitating collaboration, allowing expressions of judgement and what Andrew McAfee calls fostering emergence - that is, allowing new information and work patterns to spontaneously appear by making the tools available.

Ross Mayfield, whose wiki software SocialText plays a starring role in the just-released SuiteTwo package of enterprise 2.0 tools, is sanguine about the impact of this on organisations:

Very soon a user will wake up in the morning, log in to SuiteTwo, immediately recognize something emerging. With the top blog posts telling her what the company is talking about, the top wiki pages showing her what people are working on, top posts from the outside that her company is subscribed to and the feedback from what they are publishing - something will emerge.

Sticks-in-the-mud may regard this emergence stuff as ‘chatter’ and wonder when this user is going to be doing old-fashioned stuff like getting on with her job. It’s a genuine concern and the need for small pilot programmes and metrics for its ROI will be as necessary to any Enterprise 2.0 project as it is to any other change in the way businesses work.

*In my view, ‘extensions’ is a bit redundant, but I guess SLATS wouldn’t sound nearly as good. ‘Links’ is a bit lame too, but there’s already something called SATS.

One thing you have to love about ZDNet blogger Dion Hinchcliffe are his wacky infographics.

Here’s Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 in a pretty scary nutshell:

Here’s what it all means. (I’ll comment on this when I have time to do it justice).

And here’s his flickr set of similar pics to spice up your PowerPoint and boggle your audience. Dion has stated that he’s fine with people re-using them, providing they’re attributed.