Time for Enterprise 2.0 to grow up

I'll be attending my third Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston next week. It's a great conference and I always learn a lot, but I hope the conference is moving forward this year. MIT professor Andrew McAfee coined the term back in 2006 to define a set of software and services that emulated Web 2.0 tools like blogs, wikis, Twitter and Facebook inside the enterprise. The idea was to take all the best parts of these tools and move them behind the firewall where workers could collaborate and share information in a more natural way than traditional enterprise tools.

Here we are in 2010, and it's time we grew up. This isn't a wildly new approach anymore, so here are some broad themes I'm hoping we are past:

Mixing up the open web and enterprise 2.0

Let's hope at long last we don't hear panelists mixing up the open web and Enterprise 2.0 (as I wrote after last year's conference in "Why are we still blurring Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 Concepts"). The whole idea of Enterprise 2.0 is to move the Web 2.0 concepts in-house. That means any of the concerns you might have about the open web really don't apply. So please, I don't want to hear anyone even mention Facebook and Twitter when discussing Enterprise 2.0. They are different.

The generational myth

Another issue that always seems to come up when people want to find a way to dismiss Enterprise 2.0 concepts is that it's only for the younger generation. Again, this is just nonsense (as I wrote last year in "The Enterprise 2.0 generational myth"). The fact is older people are embracing Web 2.0 tools like Twitter and Facebook, and are therefore fully capable of learning and using similar tools inside the enterprise. To suggest that older workers can't adapt to a changing work place is really insulting, and in fact, according to a case study presented at last year's conference by Lockheed Martin employees, age wasn't even an issue when they implemented an Enterprise 2.0 framework. As I wrote last year:

"Keohane reported that the older population had no problem adjusting to these new tools. They even wanted the ability to customize and create mash-ups."

Security issues

Another big concern we seem to hear every year is that somehow you'll be compromising security by using Enterprise 2.0. Without a doubt, you should have a set of policies and procedures in place for the open web, and employees still have to follow certain common sense procedures in-house like not publicly discussing the impending layoff or the upcoming IPO, but beyond that, it's as safe and secure as any in-house communications tool. I don't hear people screaming about the evils of instant messaging and email, so why do we continually hear about security issues with Enterprise 2.0 tools?

I'll be spending next Monday, Tuesday and part of Wednesday at Enterprise 2.0 in Boston and next week's issue will be largely devoted to conference coverage. I'll let you know if these issues have been tabled once and for all, or if we are hearing about new issues in the world of Enterprise 2.0. - Ron

Note: We'll be publishing on Thursday (June 17) next week instead of Wednesday.