Notwithstanding the points raised in recent and past posts about hesitation, resistance and other various challenges to E2.0 implementation and adoption as organizations circle it like a group of neighbourhood dogs nervously eyeing and sniffing a porcupine, it seems clear that eventually organizations will have to realize that the tools and services that comprise what we call Enterprise 2.0 are tools and services that address in fundamental ways how people do knowledge work.

It’s that simple … to do much of what we call knowledge work (other than filling in boxes on forms) people need to connect, talk, listen, point to sources and noodle together over ideas and new information.  They look, in conversations, for ways to stitch information and knowledge together so that it becomes useful.  That’s what humans have always done .. it’s only in the last 100 years or so that we have had the sequential arranging and measurement of tasks and highly-structured division of labour that we have understood as work during most of this lifetime.  As Bill Ives points out in the previous post, things are changing, and (relatively) fast, even though I am fond of the phrase "it takes a long time for change to happen quickly"  (think about that for a second).

One more piece of evidence that "organizations will have to realize …" is the recent announcement that Microsoft is testing, and may offer the corporate market, a Facebook-like application called TownSquare, a business-user-focused social networking application..  Whether one think Microsoft is the answer to E2.0 for their organization or not is not the point here … the point is that most or all of the large vendors are now adding features and functionality (or acquiring them) such that the platforms being used to support the work of knowledge workers will have been substantially re-tooled  before another 5 years passes.  And that re-tooling will consist largely of social computing capabilities.

And then there’s the culture issue

Will Management 2.0 be needed before or after an organization addresses E2.0 ?

The excerpt on Microsoft below via ZDNet:

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Microsoft to show off a corporate Facebook-like prototype
Mary-Jo Foley

Office Labs – an incubator within Microsoft testing business-focused technologies that may or may not end up part of future Microsoft products — is showing off this week yet another of its ideas.

The latest, known as “TownSquare,” is a business-user-focused social-networking tool. According to Computerworld, Microsoft will demo the new offering at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston on June 12.

TownSquare, via a layout similar to Facebook’s, provides internal company information, ranging from promotions and anniversaries, to a list of shared-document modifications pertinent to individual users.

TownSquare was launched inside Microsoft in January, according to the aforementioned report, and has been test driven by 8,000 Microsoft employees so far.

Microsoft has been stepping up its work on a number of other social-networking-related projects throughout the company. At its TechFest research fair earlier this year, Microsoft officials showed off a FriendFeed-like aggregation tool, codenamed C2, which is likely to find its way into Windows Live for Mobile some time in the relatively near future. And earlier this week, Microsoft rolled out a test build of a SharePoint Server plug-in for producing/managing podcasts.

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