Pete provided a look into what Wachovia is doing with enterprise 2.0 today at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. He noted that they have made extensive use of collaboration tools – wikis, blogs, video blogs, contextual awareness of presence team sites, enriched profiles, one to one video conferencing, group chat in one comprehensive integrated framework. What was especially interesting was the reasons that senior executives found compelling to support this effort and the reasons they were less interested in.

First the four business reasons for adopting enterprise 2.0 that got senior execs excited about enterprise 2.0. Take notes.

1. As company grew there was an increasing need to collaborate across time zones. This became apparent as they made more acquisitions and at first, had difficulty just going across one time zone. The enterprise 2.0 tools addressed this issue.

2. When they were a regional bank, the bank found that company events (picnics) and activities (softball league) helped build commitment. Now they saw the need to build a similar sense of community and commitment on a global basis with the new enterprise 2.0 tools.

3. Like many companies they have maturing workforce and were concerned with the lose of knowledge. Now with enterprise 2.0 tools they are capturing knowledge in the process of work through wikis, blogs, and similar means.

4. They saw the need to engage generation y workers. This caught imagination of senior executives when their research showed that generation y workers come with greater engagement but within a year they dropped to below average on engagement because there were no tools for engagement. The new employees were also driven down by the hierarchy. Enterprise 2.0 tools provide the means of engagement with tools they are used to using that allow for participation

There are now 60,000 employees in this platform. Pete has received many positive comments on his internal blogs on the availability of these tools.

Now here are the other reasons that were useful but were also less important to senior execs.

1. Ability to position the bank as an innovative workplace (this seems to correlate highly with reason 4 above)
2. Ability to save travel money
3. Ability to provide world class tools to compete, putting team productivity on top individual productivity.

There were a few others on this list. If anyone was there they can add to these less important items. I think kudos go to Wachovia for implementing this on a massive scale.