Enterprise 2.0 as conventional wisdom
Last week’s conference sweep was a great opportunity to see two very different communities talk about Web 2.0 and its impact on the enterprise. At Defrag, it was the Cluetrain cabal and associated communards who have led the charge to create social software; at the InfoToday conferences (ESS/West, KMWorld and Taxonomy Boot Camp) it was IT people trying to make sense of where it goes into their systems portfolios.
Unfortunately I can’t draw direct comparisons using my postings as I wasn’t able to live blog the InfoToday conferences the way I did Defrag (being too busy speaking in sessions and at our tradeshow booth,) but the thing that struck me was the unanimity of the viewpoints of the two groups. Practical advice on where wikis, blogs, social network software and prediction markets fit into the enterprise was remarkably consistent across speakers at all of these conferences and, more importantly, stated in an actionable way. The two highlights in this respect for me were Andrew McAfee’s talk at Defrag and Dave Snowden’s Thursday keynote at KMWorld.
It feels like technology adoption in this case has happened much more suddenly than in past cycles.