My colleague over at the ZDNet blogging consortium, Dion Hinchcliffe, has just posted a year-end wrap-up of the state of Enterprise 2.0, and what a year it’s been.

Dion, who has been far out front of the industry in his thinking and writing on Enterprise 2.0, predicts that 2007 will be the year that Enterprise 2.0 “will significantly break out into the enterprise.”

Enterprise 2.0 entered the lexicon earlier this year, Dion notes, when Andrew McAfee , a Harvard professor, introduced the term and philosophy in a Harvard Business School blog post, based on an article he wrote for the MIT Sloan Management Review. McAfee described Enterprise 2.0 as “simple, free platforms for self-expression that remove the last remaining barriers to sharing information using Web technologies, given that even very trivial barriers can drastically reduce creativity and contribution.”

Dion also tracked the growth of the two main core elements of Enterprise 2.0 (blogs and wikis), and finds there has been considerable adoption over the past two years, overtaking traditional communication channels. Dion’s chart is posted below:

But there’s a lot more to Enterprise 2.0 than simply posting or participating in blogs and wikis. Dion observes that that its becoming a key part of enterprise management:

“CIOs, and more importantly, technology savvy workers are increasingly applying Enterprise 2.0 within their organizations because it can often be adopted very inexpensively, is by its intrinsic nature easy to use (requiring little if any end-user training), and many believe that it can be applied incrementally. This makes Enterprise 2.0 IT-friendly on numerous fronts to deploy by already harried, budget-pressured IT departments that are eager to deliver some low-risk wins. And informal data does suggest that many organizations will indeed be trying next year to get at the promise of productivity that Enterprise 2.0 tools offers.”

Dion also notes the challenges and obstacles that lay ahead for Enterprise 2.0, including “fears of a loss of control of communication within organizations; worries over the ‘dumbing down’ of corporate conversation; the available means of determining the accuracy of information captured and shared by employees using Enterprise 2.0 tools.” Plus, he notes, actual reference case studies of companies successfully deploying the methodologies are few and far between.

(For more on the obstacles and challenges, fellow FastForward blogger Jerry Bowles just posted a great summary of the leading management fears with Enterprise 2.0. Much of it boils down to fear of a loss of control.)

Dion didn’t venture specific predictions for 2007 yet but promises to do so in a later post. He does, however, link to Jevon MacDonald’s list of seven predictions for the year ahead. Jevon predicts plenty of announcements from IBM and Microsoft around Enterprise 2.0 tools, as well as more articles from Andrew McAfee.

Interestingly, Jevon also predicts that adoption of Enterprise 2.0 will be lukewarm in large enterprises, but mainly within small companies of 100 employees or less, especially around SaaS offerings.

My thinking is that within larger enterprises, SaaS is more likely to be delivered internally, as part of SOA strategy. I’ll be discussing this relationship between SOA, SaaS, and Enterprise 2.0 in more detail over the coming weeks.