Unbundling the 20th Century Mindset

Having spent the past three years of my life in the Enterprise 2.0 / Collaborative software market, I remain struck by the industry’s continued lack of ability to define a compelling reason for enterprises to adopt new software applications, such as blogs, wikis, microblogs, etc. In the early days of the Enterprise 2.0 movement, much of this software was dismissed as the next wave of Knowledge Management, which was largely viewed as a zero ROI investment (or at least in the eyes of the venture capital community, it did not produce any break out, high return investments). Today, it is largely viewed as a necessary evil because the likes of Facebook and Twitter are impossible for the enterprise to ignore.

Yet the compelling case remains elusive still. This situation does amaze me, as it seems clear that collaborative management processes, and the software that powers these processes, will drive the next great wave of business productivity. As my nGenera colleague Tammy Erickson likes to point out, the way corporations have organized and managed, and set up processes to get work done has not changed much in over 100 years … yet, the costs of communicating and collaborating have accelerated toward zero and the next generation of workers have grown up on these new collaborative technologies and processes … the train has left the station and it is not coming back. Also, John Chambers of Cisco tends to agree with this statement. …