Yet Another Software Blog: What's the big deal about Enterprise 2.0?

What's the big deal about Enterprise 2.0?

Entire blogs are dedicated to covering the topic, and we can't forget the exceptionally tortured semantic debate over what would be allowed to live under the Enterprise 2.0 tent.

There are many opinions on what defines "Enterprise 2.0." I myself lean towards Andrew McAfee's definition. If Enterprise 2.0 comes to mean "anything new happening in the enterprise," it becomes a meaningless term.

Tortured semantic debates are a typical feature of the adoption of new expressions, no matter how well or poorly they might have been defined at the outset. Even those expressions that had a clear and unambiguous meaning to begin with soon suffer from terminological drift.

It's human nature. Marketeers are always keen to have their products and services seen as up to date. No matter than their company's offerings are in truth outmoded and incapable of meeting the new demands, perception is all. By hijacking the terms used to describe the genuinely new, the marketing people can make the product meet this perception without putting their employers to the trouble and expense of doing any actual engineering.

The customers - as gullible and impatient as ever - swallow the marketeers' guff. What do they and suppliers care about semantic exactitude? They are, respectively, consumers and inventors of business mythologies, not of technical truths. Meanwhile, the originators of the term tear their hair out at what has happened to their carefully wrought words and ideas.