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Claims that the concept of ‘enterprise 2.0’ is defunct have helped to clarify what social technology can and cannot do for businesses

As the Enterprise 2.0 conference kicked off in the heart of Silicon Valley in early November, any of the 1,600 attendees checking their Twitter feeds may have been in for a shock. According to some of the tweets posted that morning, enterprise 2.0 is dead.

The word was that enterprise 2.0, a broad term used to describe the use of social technology in business, had reached the end of its useful life. The death knell precipitated a barrage of arguments and counter-arguments that, unsurprisingly given the subject matter, took the form of tweets and blog posts.

It is tempting, and not altogether inaccurate, to dismiss the episode as yet another arcane debate over terminology, the kind that the IT industry periodically wraps itself around as practitioners in the real world get on with doing their jobs.

But it does have some significance. The fact that the knives are out for the term ‘enterprise 2.0’ suggests that there is some antipathy towards the idea, or at least its failure to yet produce the anticipated results. Why this is, and whether the idea needs to be rethought, are two important questions for the future of business software.

A question of meaning

Originally, the term enterprise 2.0 was conceived as a business response to Web 2.0. The evolution of blogs, wikis and RSS feeds had transformed the web from a passive to an active experience. This was changing how people interacted with one another, so it stood to reason that businesses would be affected in one way or another.

More recently, the term has come to refer more explicitly to the use of social technology in a business context. Andrew McAfee, the Harvard Business School professor that coined the term, now defines it as “the use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers”.

This definition covers two distinct kinds of interaction – internal and external. Importantly, that means enterprise 2.0 is a concern for two departments of the enterprise: marketing and IT.

This division is one of the bugbears of enterprise 2.0 naysayers. In a provocative post entitled ‘Enterprise 2.0 is beyond a crock. It’s dead’, blogger Dennis Howlett observed that, “On the one hand you have people who think [enterprise 2.0] is about collaboration, while others portray the topic as an extension to sales and marketing. It could be both, but very often you will see [definitions] co-mingled as though they are one and the same.”

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