My colleague Bill Ives just posted a thought-provoking discussion on why Web 2.0 is not the same animal as Enterprise 2.0.

There are definitely clear distinctions between the consumerist Web 2.0 services in play out there, versus the tools and services businesses are adopting. When technologies or services are taken behind the firewall, their purpose and requirements change, which is to solve business problems.

It’s worth noting, however, that in recent years, starting with the PC, we have seen a lot of consumer technologies percolating into the enterprise. As a recent article in Knowledge@Wharton observes, the lines keep blurring — “the boundaries between corporate and consumer technologies are beginning to disappear.”

As Christian Terwiesch, a professor of operations and information management at Wharton, put it: “We have observed a convergence of technologies between these two segments [consumer and corporate] because the user needs have been converging. For instance, workers are demanding that corporate technology — say a search tool within a company — be as user friendly as Google’s popular search site.”

In fact, the article notes, in a few years, as predicted by Gartner, at least 10% of all information technology
spending will reside with employees (for laptops, iPhones and the like), and they will customize at least 90% of the technology they use at work.

Beyond gadgetry and online videos, the article goes on to make a very important observation as well: “the line between personal lives and work has blurred.” Employees often perform personal tasks — like watching the latest popular video on YouTube or shopping at Amazon.com — at work and they frequently complete corporate tasks at home on their own time.

Perhaps, as Clay Shirky is saying (cited here by Jim McGee), the organization as we know it is disappearing. Yes, there are still formal government regulations that define the legal status of an “employee” and how many hours are worked per week and so forth. But thanks to information technology and networking, organizations can function more effectively as confederations of entrepreneurs/service providers than as rigid, hierarchical 9-to-5 entities.

There are issues, of course. Security, for one, can be a real show-stopper. Many companies are not comfortable — and may even have legal issues with — with the idea of data and processes being taken to offsite providers. These are issues that have to be worked out.

However, the boundaries between consumer-business technology and work-life have blurred to the point where there’s no going back. Just as continuing education is a personal initiative that is in every company’s best interest to foster, the knowledge and value being gained through “consumerist” social networking and computing will only come back to enrich productivity and spur motivation within the enterprise.