The Mindjet Blog

My co-worker Tom Blossom and I attended the “SIG Software: Web 2.0 in the Enterprise” event this past Thursday in Santa Clara.

Jeff Nolan (SAP), Ross Mayfield (Socialtext), and Charlene Li (Forrester Research) were the panelists. After moderator Jeff Clavier (SoftTech VC) had tried to decipher the “alphabet soup” of Web 2.0 applications, the panel soon became an open forum in a perfect example of true web 2.0 social interaction. An at times heated debate brought those who denied the game-changing nature of web 2.0 applications for the enterprise in opposition to those who consider it a radical disruption for the traditional players that they will hardly be able to ignore. One of the most memorable statements from the audience: “Web 1.0 meant you expected answers to your questions from someone else; Web 2.0 means all of us here are giving you the answer to your question.”

Other key takeaways were: Wikis are conversations based on trust and therefore may or may not have a place in the strictly regulated enterprise architecture. The fact is that more and more professionals smuggle web 2.0 services into their organizations bypassing IT (as one panelist aptly noted, “The last time I went to IT they gave me a list with all the projects they would NOT implement this year.”) But it also seems true that there is still a long way to go before the enterprise comfortably places its data on third-party hosted services - with SAP (which works with wikis hosted by Socialtext) and some others being the notable exception. Blogs, wikis, mash-ups and the like are only slowly making inroads to where the big money is. A recent Gallup survey found that still only 22 of the Fortune 500 companies run public blogs.

Zoli’s Blog has a very detailed summary of the event.

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