I am attending the Enterprise 2.0 Executive Forum at Lunar Park in Sydney. The event is hosted by Future Exploration and Ross Dawson.

Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School defines Enterprise 2.0 as:

The use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers.

These social software platforms would include: wikis, blogs, social networks, prediction markets, RSS, links, search and tags.

Dawson opened the event with a presentation on business value creation as it relates to Enterprise 2.0. Dawson presented recommendations for Enterprise 2.0:

• Make governance an enabler
• Start from business applications, not tools
• Make work easier
• Build strategies at the architecture level
• Allow experimentation
• Create pilots that yield useful lessons

The last two points here have come through as strong themes from all of the presenters as has the need to ‘ask for forgiveness rather than asking for permission’.

The over-riding message is that Enterprise 2.0 platforms need to be allowed to develop and emerge organically within an organisation. Managers should resist the tempatation to apply structure and to act as administrators, style guides and editors.

McAfee referred to email as the incumbent collaboration technology and pointed to research that shows that users tend to under-estimate the potential of new collaboration technologies and over-estimate the benefits of platforms that they are already acquainted with.

There has been some talk about demographics and the experience that difference groups have had with technology – Boomer, Gen X and Y.

Email may have lost relevance among the Gen Y group, who are more familiar with social networks, but the consensus is that email is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

My question: Will MicroHoo (should it happen) result in the resurgence of email based on the convergence of email and social networks. I, for one, would like to access my Yahoo! email account via Facebook (that’s not going to happen but the convergence of social networks and email must be on the agenda for this potential merger/acquisition). Web based email services remain relevant as people’s email addresses often function as the user name login for many third party sites.

The most entertaining presenter – thus far – has been Nathan Wallace, associate director – Technology at Janssen-Cilag, one of J&J’s subsidiaries. The company has 340 employees and a great wiki story to tell, which is now the channel for all internal news (saving approx. 250,000 internal emails). The take up has been very impressive and the company just added a Twitter like application for its staff, many of which are in the field.

The event has been a great advert for Confluence, it has been the sole wiki provider referenced by the presenters.

The power of predictive markets has also been a dominant theme – more on this later.