Having recently finished a book on Enterprise 2.0, I went through the experience of trying to define Enterprise 2.0. To start with, anything with the moniker "2.0" gets some disdain from people. My co-author, the technical editor, and the author of the foreward of the book all agreed they didn't like the term Enterprise 2.0. And rightly so - it seems everybody is jumping on the bandwagon as we see PR 2.0, Security 2.0, Government 2.0, etc...
In the beginning there was "Web 2.0", coined and trademarked by O'Reilly (which ended up in a trademark scandal). Enterprise 2.0 was subsequently coined by Andrew McAfee as the application of Web 2.0 technologies into large corporate enterprises.
The terms seem to have changed. If you go to the Enterprise 2.0 page on Wikipedia, it is actually redirected to the page "Enterprise social software" which states:
Enterprise social software, also known as Enterprise 2.0, is a term describing social software used in "enterprise" (business) contexts.
Social software is huge, but I'm going to push back on Wikipedia's definition and say that social software is a subset of Enterprise 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 includes more - Mashups, Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), Enterprise Search, and Software as a Service (SaaS) to name a few. Enterprise 2.0 is about less complexity and a better user experience (UX).
But Enterprise 2.0 is not just about technology. Culture is a big part of it. A few weeks ago I was chatting with Jevon MacDonald and we both expressed some disillusion over the lack of actual implementation of Enterprise 2.0 we were seeing. We both live and breathe the technology so for us it is hard to understand why more corporations don't embrace Enterprise 2.0. Recently I've heard people express concern that Enterprise 2.0 isn't taking off. There are so few successful companies in the Enterprise 2.0 space.
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