Dion Hinchiffe authored an essential post on the State of Enterprise 2.0. It’s less a survey of Enterprise 2.0 technologies or vendors than a survey of the state of adoption among mainline businesses. Some key insights I gleaned from the article include:

• Enterprise 2.0 is more about a change in mindset than a particular set of technologies. Enterprise 2.0 products are social tools, and cultural change accompanies their use.
• Organizations will find these tools proliferating throughout their enterprises, due to low barriers to adoption. Remember that much of Enterprise 2.0 was piloted on the Internet. The designers of those tools knew that the only reason their applications achieved wide adoption was because they were easy to use and solved customer problems. (Even if the problem is something trivial, like what my friends are doing right now.)
• Enterprise 2.0 technologies tend not to displace existing IT investments, but to add value to them. This is largely due to the grassroots adoption of Enterprise 2.0 tools, but also with making participation in online communities optional. Join if you want, contribute if you want, but nobody can force you to do so. (In fact, as the FASTforward blog points out, it’s rare to find firms that aren’t actively standing in the way of Enterprise 2.0 adoption.)

Head over to the ZDNet blogs and have a look.

Related posts

1. Paul Graham on Enterprise 2.0
2. Thoughts on the Viability of Enterprise 2.0 Webinar
3. There is no Enterprise
4. Two Kinds of Enterprise Software
5. Enterprise 2.0: The Software Social