Why Enterprise 2.0 Won't Succeed - IDC Directions Follow-up

There was a great breakfast presentation on Tuesday the 17th by Michael Fauscette, Group Vice President, Software Business Solutions at IDC. The presentation was really about leveraging 2.0 technologies and approaches in the partner channel. But the broader Enterprise 2.0 piece was of course a part of the discussion.

The problem we (Contextware) have with 2.0 technologies and initiatives (ironic I'm blogging about this), is that regardless of the problem they are trying to solve they inherently lack structure in how information is captured and organized. The ability of the mob to contribute content and information via a wiki, blog, community of practice, twitter, yammer or blather is very democratic...but also chaotic by their nature, whereas businesses are highly structured entities and require organization of chaos to be effective. While this is a self-serving viewpoint for Contextware, since we argue that information should be structured around the processes people are tasked with performing, the viewpoint isn't without merit.

Enterprise 2.0 will experience the same problems that content management systems (one of its technological predecessors has):

-massive amounts of information produced stored in loose structures
-challenges navigating that content...with search often exacerbating the problem based on the number of results it returns
-determining stale vs. fresh content, and the battle to keep information relevant
-authoritative commentary vs. blather
-finding a way to capture information from the best performers in the business who often have the least amount of time to contribute.