This, from itbusiness.ca, Canadian business magazine, reads a bit as a puff piece, but is still interesting:

Donald Rippert, Accenture’s chief technology officer,”sees the future of computing in the enterprise” in “the kinds of things teenagers are doing online.” Rippert “has already begun making that vision a reality at Accenture, …borrowing ideas from online services such as Facebook, De.licio.us, YouTube, Wikipedia and Second Life to remake Accenture’s employee intranet.”

“Rippert looked at YouTube and wondered why a teenager can find a an amateur video on the site quickly and easily, but finding a video of a corporate presentation in a business’s archives is next to impossible if you don’t know the exact title of the file. He picked up on the idea of allowing every user to tag content.” “This month, Accenture went live with a new global employee network that looks much like Facebook.”

It would be interesting to take a look at Accenture’s new offering, and I’ll see whether that’s possible. Rippert goes on to say that more is coming, including wikis.

I wonder, when you read the article, whether you’ll agree about two things that stick out for me.

1. wikis are coming late in the cycle. It’s not wikis or any software for user-generated content that is driving this new architecture. And, Rippert stresses, employees won’t be pressured into using wikis or similar software.

2. instead what seems to drive the process for Rippert and Accenture is tagging and social search. The new ways to search, unlike wikis, Rippert adds, “will replace the old way of doing things and employees will have little choice about using them.”

Lets keep an eye on this; are we seeing a new order of Enterprise 2.0 implementation develop, in which tagging, social search, and Facebook-like profiles lead the way? These technologies seem to lean more in the direction of social networking and rather away from collaboration.

Not that these are unrelated, but there is a difference, and it’s worth watching whether powering emergent phenomena like networking takes precedence over powering the more traditional end of “the architecture of participation.”

I think entrepreneurs, investors and enterprise technology strategists should all be very interested to learn more about Accenture’s new goodies. What do you think?