InformationWeek — Most Business Tech Pros Wary About Web 2.0 Tools In Business

J. Nicholas Hoover — 24 February 2007

For all the mind-numbing buzz about Web. 2.0, most business collaboration and information sharing remains mired in endless e-mail strings and scheduled conference calls. More than half of business technology pros surveyed by InformationWeek are either skeptical about tools such as blogs, wikis, and online social networks, or they’re willing but wary of adopting them. What gives?

[Snip] Despite the risks and problems, a solid minority of the 250 business technology pros surveyed by InformationWeek are behind this IT strategy push that has come to be known as Enterprise 2.0 (even if the overplayed 2.0 terminology makes some people wince). Nearly a third, 32%, describe their Web 2.0 strategies as fully engaged, our survey finds

The start of a useful snapshot of a bandwagon.

I do a mental ‘global search and replace’ with articles like this, reading “groupware” whenever I see the expression, “Enterprise 2.0” (and losing little of the sense in the process). There is not much here that was not at least being tried in the 1980s and 90s. The main novelties are the Web and pervasive mobile telecommunications, which provide computing environments that were not generally available until the mid 1990s or so.

Just about everything else is an updated version of something old. These ‘E2.0’ aids to human collaboration differ only or mainly by using new infrastructure and tools. Their purpose and modi operandi are the same as ten or more years ago.

This is not to denigrate the achievement of their developers and the attractiveness of their products. Grabbing the mind of the user is more than half the battle in producing successful groupware, as its use is often at the employee’s discretion. It is seldom, in that useful IBM term, line of business and is thus seldom imposed. (Not that I’m arguing for compulsory collaboration. That’s almost an oxymoron.)

All the same, I wish some of these hot-gospelling authors would take the time to do two things – explain to the rest of us what Enterprise 1.0 is or was, and then tell us in breathful prose what the new version can do that the old one couldn’t. There may be some substantive and worthwhile differences between E1.0 and E2.0 but, for now, I don’t know what they might be.