Putting Enterprise 2.0 into PracticePutting Enterprise 2.0 into Practice

At last year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference many conference goers called for more Enterprise 2.0 use cases. They wanted to know how organizations were becoming 2.0. What results were they seeing? What challenges and further opportunities still exist? Enterprise 2.0 guru Andrew McAfee echoed this need and called for a central repository of use cases to host great examples of Enterprise 2.0 in action. He created the Cases 2.0 wiki in response. So have we made any progress in the 8 months that have passed? Yesterday Susan Scrupski posted that "the Enterprise 2.0 community has failed (with any convincing success)... to produce business and game-changing case studies of measurable business improvement" indicating that perhaps we have not made as much progress as we would have liked.But reading through the speaker submissions for the 2008 Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I'm pleasantly surprised to see some excellent use cases coming in.These submissions include examples from Lockheed Martin, Intel, Wallem, NASA, BearingPoint, Fidelity and ATT to name just a few, and each conveys specific examples of how Enterprise 2.0 tools, technologies and methodologies are having real business impact. A submission from executive search firm Spencer Stuart describes how "Enterprise 2.0 technologies including RSS, Blogs, Wikis, Search, and Alerts provide knowledge workers with relevant, timely information in easy-to-consume formats." Union Bank of California is using RSS for corporate distribution list communications that would have otherwise happened on email. So maybe we're making progress here.Perhaps Ken Pauley, one of our Enterprise 2.0 Facebook members hit the nail on the head in this discussion board post a couple weeks ago:"Many of the sessions last year were great, but too many of the success stories or case studies were not what I would call Enterprise class deployments. There are a lot of challenges in deploying these technologies to large enterprises (25k+ employees); identity management, intranet vs extranet solutions, governance, etc. Hearing more about successes on that scale plus where companies are challenged would be very interesting in my book...others agree?"I do, Ken. Many of the use cases I'm reviewing are tackling a very specific function, usually within a single group within an organization. There are very few examples of Enterprise 2.0 being scaled to "enterprise" class. I'm confident more of these large-scale stories will emerge but it will take time. In the meantime we can learn a lot from what companies have accomplished so far.