With a sea change of influence taking hold in the enterprise content management (ECM) landscape — open source, SaaS, enterprise search and all things web 2.0 — I can’t help but wonder how they’ll affect the overall ECM ecosystem. The aforementioned are all things that are quickly coagulating to compose what many of us call Enterprise 2.0.

ECM customers, vendors, developers, and integrators are all beginning to feel the heat from these purveyors of usability, connectedness, community, and collaboration. How does the saying go? If you can’t beat’em, join’em, right?

I’m not saying the traditional ECM powerhouses will be overtaken by these next generation upstarts, at least not in the traditional, competitive sense. I think the takeover will involve “mindshare”, which will be stolen from the stoic and slow-moving enterprise software vendors that fail to enable and empower those influential end users.

As more enterprise 2.0 initiatives move from the playground to the the boardroom, what type of leader will you need to drive business value from ECM? I’ll contend you’ll not only need someone with classical training in the document and records management world, but someone that understands the emerging trends and applications that ECM infrastructure will (and is slowly starting to) inevitably rely on for expanded functionality.(open source,social media,RSS)

Things like enterprise blogging and wiki platforms are just two solutions that will play a crucial role in the enterprise 2.0 environment. They’ll provide rapid ways to deploy communication capabilities that were typically constrained to client server software and IT’s chokehold.

Think of it like this. What happen’s when the LOB or IT group finishes their initial requirements doc and customer service approaches them wanting to implement a tagging (folksonomy) system to enhance search and retrieval of client data? What about when marketing asks how they can RSS-enable all of the content that’s stored in your web content management (WCM) system. Those are very rudimentary scenarios, but ones that would probably pose considerable challenges for most of today’s enterprises.

If you believe the coming impact of enterprise 2.0, don’t just pepper your ECM team (or any other team) with Web 2.0 consultants and hope the knowledge transfer takes place.

Plan your enterprise 2.0 strategy now. Just do it, two dot oh.