Enterprise 2.0 & Content

Dan Farber has nicely pulled together a couple of points in a post that suggest the inevitability of "Enterprise 2.0".

Dan references a post by Euan Semple that has been picked-up by Ross Mayfield, Tim O'Reilly and others, and a post of his own where he reports on some of Don Tapscott's research: "...the 80 million Net generation young adults coming into the workplace will want to be part of an engage and collaborate model rather than command and control."

In addition to the demographic fundamentals, there is some kind of a parallel here with the evolution of information technology where the rigid structured data in relational databases is now dwarfed by the unstructured or semi-structured content in content repositories and websites. And also with the increasingly distributed IT function.

(rigidly) structured data -> unstructured data or content
(rigidly) structured organization -> unstructured organization

Do these parallels make Enterprise 2.0 more certain? Well, the fundamentals (the demographics and the new expectations and behavior) are true in a very real sense already. But of course this doesn't mean that any particular Enterprise 2.0 products or technologies or best practices or methodologies or organizational reengineering will work. Dion Hinchcliffe has an extended thoughtful response that reinforces the fact that wikis etc. are proliferating behind the firewall, but also cautions that enterprise IT is a complex and controlled environment where enterprise 2.0 tools need to find a post-adolescent home.