The Boston Globe recently had a review of the music CDs for 2006. It started like this, “2006 was a DIY year in music, and we’re not talking about a glut of homemade albums. The do-it-yourselfers were the fans, not the artists. We read each other’s blogs, listened to millions of songs online, shared our discoveries, and bought the music we liked rather than the music the suits tried to sell us.” There are many emerging web 2.0 tools to support this interest. I was approached recently by a site, uPlayMe, that is “a free social networking application designed to link people with similar tastes in musical artists, songs or genres.”

What happens when these people go to work and find the suits are in charge? How can we bring this same level of participation and engagement inside the enterprise? I think you know where this is going, another promo for Enterprise 2.0. It is such a great opportunity to engage the most recent generation in the workforce and counter all these negative employee surveys I have heard about. Enterprise 2.0 is also a way for smart companies to attract the right people as the employee shortage that has been predicted starts to take hold. For example, there are many tools and ways that can link people with similar business (or even music) interests inside the enterprise.

I really liked Euan Semple’s, Ten questions companies SHOULD be asking themselves about Enterprise 2.0. They were the questions that would be asked by the same people who participated in the Web music scene of 2006. How do we get them to do the same thing inside their workplace? Euan also addressed the issue in Business as Usual. One result will be DIY KM as their activities create an accessible archive of their activities or interactions. McKinsey did a report, The Next Revolution in Interactions, on the importance of interactions in adding value and the need to support them with the proper IT investments. If done right it could be the same level of engaged interactions as described in the Globe except that they would now be covering matters of the enterprise and they would be accessible for future use. Jevon MacDonald wrote on some of the issues in From Inside to Outside: How do new organizations work? and referred to a book with right title, Trusted Space, with Robert Patterson.

Indus Khaitan commented on my post on the change management issues in enterprise 2.0 , “The aspects are definitely human; it requires evangelization in from of the CIO, or the Knowledge Officer. In corporations we’re still seeing initiatives around traditional Content Management System which give us nothing more than a “static intranet”. This is because the executive leadership does not see a visible ROI around “Writable Intranet”. Employee recruitment and retention could become one motivator and one very significant ROI.