Enterprise 2.0: A Report Card

Disclaimer: The following post is based exclusively on my own observations and discussions with colleagues. In other words, this post is not a to be a survey or scientific study.

As I write in The Next Wave of Technologies, sometime toward the latter part of the last decade, we entered Enterprise 2.0. Monikers aside, new enterprise technologies have been with us for a while now and it’s high time we ask, “How are organizations doing so far?”

First, let’s take a step back first and discuss the precursor to Enterprise 2.0: Its 1.0 equivalent. At a high level, in the mid-1990s, many companies began deploying ERP and CRM applications. Most organizations moved from mainframes to relational databases like Oracle, SQL Server, and dB2. They introduced e-mail, ecommerce, and relatively simple websites. A relatively brave few dabbled with business intelligence and data mining. Unfortunately, far too often, data silos hamstrung organizations and their employees.