You've heard about it, you've read about it... but exactly, what is this? how does this help/damage my business?
What is this?
To make long story short think of web social increase of the last 4-5 years. Think about Wikipedia, YouTube, Spaces...
Well put all of these inside the Enterprises and you'll have the point.
Where did this started?
The concept was first coined by (to the best of my knowledge) Andrew P. McAfee where he took the benefits and characteristics of Web 2.0 and positioned them in the corporations.
Benefits perceived through wikis, blogs and in general web social phenomena are being positioned in the enterprise environment.
How does this help/damage my business?
How many times you find useful information in blogs, in public wikis more and more the information is available earlier in these resources than in official web sites. The accuracy or "officialness" of the info may not be the best, but there's a good chance that it's ok to work with it, besides these days, if we wait for info to be made official it may be too late to take advantage of it.
The ideas, the knowledge already exist in your company, in your information workers minds; but without the proper management all this information just leaks out of control. The benefits are for others, there is stuff that you should keep for your business not for others.
Information on how to better manage a process should be a valuable part of your assets (Intellectual Property). And should be treated as that.
On the other hand there must be a "management" of this information cause there's the risk of ending up with thousands of useless blogs which suck company's resources.
We never heard about Enterprise 1.0, did I missed a whole release?
No, Enterprise 1.0 is just before 2.0 whatever that is. I can think of the traditional approach to manage information and offer services from the IT departments; 2.0 definitely has a "user-defined" direction and a more agile approach to publish ideas and share knowledge. Whereas 1.0 was IT directed and slower.
How does this helps me... IT Professional... developer... lawyer... [put your role]?
A study from McKinsey reveals that executives realize now the advantage of investing in IT and will be more aggressive in the future. This is not an opportunity that can be tackled by one specific science or art.
Several professionals with diverse skills are needed to successfully implement these solutions. The implementation should consider/be:
In which industries are we observing this trend?
Everywhere... in education, oil and energy, healthcare, government... you name it.