Collaboration is going to happen
Michael Idinopulos at SocialText has an entry telling CIOs: It's Strategy Time in which he argues that Web 2.0 concepts and ideas (as described by Enterprise 2.0) provide an opportunity to move away from dealing with servers and firewalls to helping define the strategy for the business.
If you're a CIO, your company is looking to you to show the way. How will Enterprise 2.0 change the way you do business? What benefits can your company realize? How will this change the way you collaborate internally? How will it change your interactions with customers?
Social software and the enterprise versions of it are clearly hear to stay, as evidenced by the Internet Evolution series from Information Week and others. My take on this is that the IT group are often the last to know. They are fighting fires and dredging up money for the big XYZ implementation, and budgets have been cut so much that they find very little time to do forward-looking, interesting research.
So... it will be the business again who ask for the tools to transform the business.
Or will it? There are plenty of forward-looking groups out there who have a deep connection with the business already. They provide suggestions to the business as to what might help, the business gives it a whirl (often the early adopters), and if it works, a larger effort is made. But these are exact the kinds of CIO's and their colleagues that businesses need.
And it isn't just the CIO's who need to work with the business - it is everyone. It's the call to collaborate on getting the work done, as well as on the future of the business. It's just a question of which end of the discussion you happen to be.
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It's also (IMO) eventually the way virtually all "knowledge work" will be carried out.
When I wrote a half-book, half-vendor survey last year called "Making Knowledge Work - the arrival of Web 2.0", it became clear to me half-way through that all the major vendors' offerings were platforms that had collaboration and knowledge exchange as a core design principle. These are the replacements for the existing workplace productivity platforms. It is just a matter of time.
In my opinion it's that simple (and that complicated ;-), and it is work design and management paradigms that are the obstacles to faster and more widespread and more effective uptake.
Jon Husband