Last week I was a part of a panel about “enterprise 2.0 : usages transformation”. Here are, in a few lines, what I retain from this event. Of course these are my own impression since when you’re on stage you tend to focus on people’s concerns rather than what the panelist said.

• How do companies see enterprise 2.0 ? Must have or nice to have ?

The question was to know if there was an enterprise 2.0 issue for companes. It’s interesting to compare my experience as player of this industry with the feedebacks of people who are rather on the client side. Obviously both visions tend to align, and that’s quite a good thing.

I pointed out that the question is not to know if there’s an enterprise 2.0 concern but to know if businesses understand than adopting new practices (a word I find much more relevant than usages in a corporate context…) may help making business in a more efficient way. If yes, implementing these practices will imply joint HR/management/organization/tools initiatives that will lead to enterprise 2.0 even if this was not called this way.

I mentioned the latest McKinsey report.

In order to close the “nice to have vs must have” debate, I’d rather say there are two possible approaches : starting from defined business issues and treat all their aspects (organization, HR, business practices, tools…) or have a tool-driven approach which means saying “we have to try those new tools and see what we can do with them”. The first leads to a “must have” situation, the second is a “must try” that leads to a “nice to have” and “time consuming to use” situation due to a lack of alignment.

I’ll end with my favorite advice : “instead of wondering how to make people adopt tools you’d better wonder why”. By the way it would also close the ROI debate.

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