The man who coined 'Enterprise 2.0' on What's Next

A few years ago, companies were grappling with how to harness Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and social networks inside the enterprise. Over time, on a departmental level, business leaders would buy these technologies with or without IT's blessing to help meet their internal collaboration needs.

As people learned it was more efficient, for example, to put shared information into a wiki rather than e-mailing a Word document around to 50 people, the term Enterprise 2.0 was born. Coined by Andrew McAfee, an associate professor of technology and operations management at Harvard Business School, Enterprise 2.0 has yielded a whole industry of start-up and incumbent vendors that sell social software.

As that market meets this week for the annual Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston, CIO.com's C.G. Lynch caught up with McAfee, who recently authored a book on the topic. McAfee gives his take on how enterprises have done at adopting Web 2.0 technologies in the past year, and how the vendor landscape for selling social software to businesses has evolved.

CIO: A few years ago, when I first saw you speak at this conference, it seemed like bringing Web 2.0 into the enterprise remained a very nascent topic. Do you think it has gained more acceptance?

McAfee: When I talk to big companies now, it's very rare for me to find one that doesn't have some level of projects going that I would call Enterprise 2.0, and that's a broad definition. So that can include everything from setting up a wiki, to having an internal Facebook, or we have a large-scale SharePoint deployment going. It's very rare that I come across a company that says, "huh? What are you talking about?" And you also don't hear people saying, "Oh, we know about it, and we're doing everything we can to squelch it."

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