Web 2.0 hit company intranets, too. In 2006 the term Enterprise 2.0 was coined to describe the implementation and use of Web 2.0 technologies (”social software”) in an enterprise. Working in a big international cooperation involves lots of communication and collaboration. Some of the social tools offer great solutions to facilitate the working together.

At a conference last week I met Simon Revell, a Pfizer UK employee who had successfully helped implementing enterprise 2.0 in his organization, mainly blogs and wikis. Very interesting presentation.

First of all I was surprised that he is an IT manager, so the IT department brought this project forward, not Marketing, not Communications. I guess it would not have been possible otherwise because there was no social software available in the organisation, Simon’s team simply set up a LAMP open source environment using Drupal and hooked it to the network. Nobody but IT can do this in a company where everything is running on Microsoft technology.

Simon had an interesting story to tell about the difficulties of kicking off enterprise 2 (”Who gave you permission to do this?”), marketing the new “corporatepunks” culture, and getting their blog known to UK and international colleagues to make it a lively communication medium.

You can find out more about Simon.

Definitely check out the “Meet Charlie” presentation created by an IT colleague of his.

Now that Sharepoint 2007 is running more and more corporate intranets, enterprise 2.0 is easier to implement, at least technology-wise. Sharepoint supports blogs and wikis, not feature-rich but good enough to get started. What are we waiting for?