Web 2.0 — as glorified by Time Magazine when the publication named “You” as the Person of the Year — has moved from entertainment and social networking medium to strategic corporate weapon.

That’s the view of best-selling author and digital society guru Don Tapscott, who recently declared that Web 2.0 “is no longer about hooking up online or creating a gardening community of putting a video onto YouTube… The new Web, so-called Web 2.0 and service oriented architecture are really becoming a new mode of production, and changing the ways that we innovate, the ways that we make decisions, the ways that we collaborate, and the ways that companies engage with the rest of the world.”

Don is a featured speaker at the upcoming FASTForward ‘08, to be held February 18-20 in Orlando, Florida.

I recently moderated an ebizQ Webinar in which Don discussed how Web 2.0 technologies and approaches are dramatically changing the way businesses manage and analyze information. (Audio replay available here - registration required.)

Don Tapscott broke new ground in 1996 with his book, The Digital Economy: The Promise and Peril of Network Intelligence. His latest book is Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, co-authored with Anthony Williams.

In our Webcast, Don described how he sees the Web 2.0 world — with its high degree of collaboration — changing the face of business intelligence to “collaborative intelligence.” Prior to the introduction of Web 2.0 methodologies, he explained, internal data had “been accessible in various limited ways through traditional ERP reporting systems, MIS and business intelligence.”

Now, he continued, “for the first time, this is all being supplemented by massive quantities of additional data that is created through new models of collaboration, as consumers and employees use the new tools of collaboration — wikis, blogs and social networks.”

“The marriage of this new accessible data with the firm’s traditional internal data creates an unprecedented challenge, as well as an opportunity to gain insight into the behavior of the company’s most important stakeholders, and to translate that knowledge into success in the marketplace.”

The speed of Web 2.0 processes is also changing what end-users expect from BI approaches as well. “Think about if you do a Google search, you get the results back instantly. If the results took half a minute, or five minutes, or 10 minutes, you’d probably stop using Google so much. Traditional BI was kind of like that — which is part of why we didn’t use it so much Because you’re calling out to a disk, basically.”

The merging of Web 2.0 and business intelligence has become an enormous opportunity for growth, Don said. “For starters, we’re seeing the integration of business intelligence, which has historically has been about numbers, with content and knowledge management, which has been historically about words.” For example, Don foresees the rise of of 3-D visualization of BI data.

“The mother of all opportunities is people across an organization being able to collaborate more effectively around data.” He calls this collective intelligence the holy grail, in which “minds across an organization can come together around information and data that they believe and is relevant and timely and pertinent to them.”

(An audio replay of our recent Webcast is available here - registration required.)