For e2.0’s value to shine, I think we have to get into the psyche of the enterprise business user. By that I mean baking Web 2.0 into the their work process, an Enterprise 2.0 workflow if you will. What we e2.0 evangelists are fighting is good ‘ol fashioned legacy stuff. Legacy culture, legacy technology, and of course the legacy of web 1.0.

And those legacy effects will always (to some degree) be an inhibitor to Enterprise 2.0. Some folks just aren’t very good collaborators. I’m not sure if it’s a generational thing, a geeky thing, or just a predisposition to despise any new technology. Whatever the case, the non-collaborators and general web 2.0 naysayers will be hard to de-throne in enterprises unless we show how work gets done using web 2.0.

Without getting into an ROI discussion ad nauseam, I think it starts with an understanding of “how” the work gets done. Call it process, workflow, tasks, whatever way you describe it, there’s a set of events that trigger other events. As you analyze your processes, all sorts of things begin to crystallize. For one, you see how the information is used to create a work product. Secondly, you see the consumers of  the information and how they interact with it. And perhaps most importantly, you start to see other ways the information can be used to feed other work processes or product.(think Teqlo)

Let’s go a level deeper and use tagging or social bookmarking as an example. Most folks can understand the notion behind tagging, especially those with a more formal background in managing content. Those folks are used to terms like taxonomy, classification, metadata, and indexing. So when you describe a webby way to mark content, their lightbulbs quickly go off. From a client perspective, most of the time I use Technorati to demonstrate how tagging works. There’s a big search engine indexing stuff in near real-time. Got it.

What’s more challenging is describing scenarios where your client can incorporate tagging in the context of a workflow or process. When’s the last time you saw a delicious widget setting nicely beside say, a sales order? It’s at this point where thoughts (or nightmares) of integration, security, and maintenance all begin to rear their ugly heads. Why? I think it’s because most enterprise users haven’t seen the web infiltrate their work environment. By infiltrate I mean a real integration, one where web 2.0 applications become an integral part of their company’s service-oriented architecture (SOA). And what about the ERP providers? When will they start to OEM this stuff? Doesn’t it make sense to embed social bookmarking capabilities into your CRM system? That’s when the enterprise 2.0 workflow takes hold. That’s when Johnny in sales can finally pull his SAP data and tag it for customer support, and marketing.

Hopefully in the near future playing “tag” will evolve into more than just reminiscing about your playground days.