Redefining Enterprise 2.0

Regular readers may recall my past rants against mixing up Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0. (See "Time for Enterprise 2.0 to Grow Up") Happily I didn't see this kind of blurring at this year's show as people (at least the ones I saw speak) seemed to recognize there was a difference. At the same time, however, there seemed to be a shift in the definition of Enterprise 2.0 , at least as I had previously defined it, as more companies are pulling people from outside the enterprise into their private Enterprise 2.0 social networks.

Meet the new Enterprise 2.0

When I was here last year I didn't see a lot of discussion about including customers, suppliers, partners, former employers and so forth. Enterprise 2.0 was about just moving the Web 2.0 concepts in-house for the use by your company's employees. Now that it could involve others outside the company, it raises issues about access and sharing and how much information those outsiders can see. This is different from building pure customer communities set up as public sites that may have internal monitors because it involves allowing people from outside the company to access internal content.

Mitre example

There were several examples of how this works, but one that stuck out was a case presented by Mitre Corporation, a non-profit research company with federal government sponsors such as the Department of Defense and Homeland Security. As such, they are dealing with highly classified information, yet built a system to gain the benefits of internal social networking while inviting a variety of people outside the company who add value for a number of reasons. In fact, the CEO gave the system architects a mission to find a way to share information internally, but also with their large externally facing networks.

As Enterprise 2.0 communities cross pollinate internally and externally in this way, the tools have developed to allow these kinds of interactions. Users can mark documents for internal use only or they can block off whole areas of a group if they wish for internal use only. With any social system, there is bound to be some loss of control, but if a company like Mitre can accept this, it's likely that other security conscious companies can too.

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