[cross-posted from ITSinsider]

The 2.0 Adoption Council has begun work on a new initiative – an Adoption Index that will measure the adoption of 2.0 technologies within large enterprises. We’ll be announcing the results of our member survey at the Enterprise 2.0 conference next week, and we want to get all the friends and fans (and Twitter lists) involved. The bigger the crowd– the smarter we all are. We’d like to engage the entire community in predicting E2.0 adoption trends We’re partnering with Crowdcast to launch a prediction market that will tie in to our next survey, which will be conducted in June 2010.

As an Enterprise 2.0 fan, you’ll have the opportunity to make bets about what you think will happen with hot topics such as “What percent of budgets will be allocated to ongoing community management?” and “What percent of organizations will report using mash-ups inside the firewall?” You’ll also be able to see what others think. We’ll be giving out prizes for the most accurate bets, so if you’re ready to put your (virtual) money where your mouth is, you can request an exclusive invitation to participate here.

Why get involved? This prediction market, the first of its kind, will allow us to harness the wisdom of a broad group of experts – (that’s you!) – to develop forecasts of Enterprise 2.0 trends. This will be an excellent complement to our 2.0 Adoption Council state-of-the-market survey, which will provide regular snapshots of the current state of adoption. Not only will you know the current state of adoption, but you’ll also have insight into where things are heading.

The market will officially launch next Wednesday, November 4 at 3:00 pm at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in SF, right after the 2.0 Adoption Council research presentation, “Straight from the Horses’ Mouth” by Carl Frappaolo and Dan Keldsen at 2:40, when the results of the first Adoption Council survey will be announced. Request an invitation today here.

Today was an interesting day in the Enterprise 2.0 echo chamber that reminded me of my favorite short poem by Robert Frost,

“We all dance around the circle and suppose. The secret sits in the middle and knows.”

A spirited debate erupted this morning in the blogosphere and on Twitter whether the Enterprise 2.0 meme should be retired in favor of the newly popular Social Business meme. The best quote I heard all day was from Megan Murray at Booz Allen Hamilton, the firm that won this year’s Open Enterprise 2009 case study . Ms. Murray wrote,

“In the end I’m not concerned with what we call it. I’ve got work to do.”

The secret, in this case, is that there are millions of enterprise professionals around the world that simply are not tuned into this hair-splitting debate. Whether we’d like to admit it to ourselves or not, large organizations are predominantly still hierarchical fiefdoms. Worse? Senior management and executives still make the big, expensive decisions on strategy and execution. We can continue to debate all the nuances of what Enterprise 2.0 is or isn’t or if it should be at all, but in the end, the good news about enterprise-wide collaboration and “social” innovation will be told and sold in small, leather-chaired conference rooms around the world. And, my prediction is that it will be told and sold by top drawer management consultants like Tammy Erickson.

Tammy is both a McKinsey Award-winning author and executive speaker. As President of nGenera Insight, she has conducted ground-breaking, extensive research on changing demographics and employee values and, most recently, on how successful organizations work. Tammy has co-authored four Harvard Business Review articles and the books Retire Retirement: Career Strategies for the Boomer Generation and Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent. Her blog, Across the Ages, was one of the first Harvard Business Publishing Discussion Forum blogs. You can also find her blogging at Huffington Post.

I was the board member who nominated Tammy to open the conference this year in San Francisco. My position for supporting Tammy was rooted in the need to elevate the conversation of enterprise transformation to a senior management/executive level. Although we had many other good candidates, I felt Tammy was unique in her ability to raise the conversation to a more strategic level and connect the dots to business value. I hope you welcome her to our community.

And, I hope it’s not lost on anyone that Tammy is, well, female. Our old friend Tom Davenport, who originally pooh-poohed the Enterprise 2.0 meme, gives Tammy a ringing endorsement. I have had the pleasure of seeing Tammy speak to executive audiences; she rocks the house. I hope our tight-knit e20 community will be as delighted. I’ve already cautioned her not to call “it” by name.

Today (9/15 Eastern), Jive Software announced the first of what will be a series of insight and analytics announcements that will comprise the next version of its popular social computing platform, Jive Social Business Software (SBS) 4.0 to be announced later this fall. Today’s announcement, Jive Market Engagement, offers state-of-the art social media monitoring for Jive’s customers managing large external communities. In partnership with leading social media monitoring tool Radian6, Jive is offering real-time listening across the social web including blog posts, videos, photos, forums, mainstream online news sites, as well as social sites such as Twitter, Facebook, and Friendfeed. Where the platform provides unique value, however, is in its ability to combine data into “containers” or secure areas Jive refers to as a “Market Space” where appropriate action and decision-making can be taken on the brand conversation.

The Jive Market Engagement announcement is the first Enterprise 2.0 announcement of its kind blending traditional social media monitoring and measurement with a leading enterprise social computing platform. By integrating the data into the Jive collaboration platform, analysis becomes actionable and improves a brand’s ability to respond to time-sensitive challenges or market opportunities. Additionally, the Jive platform enables the company to store and categorize trending data that can be useful when measuring the success or ineffectiveness of marketing campaigns by geography or other market segments.

Jive’s focus on delivering actionable detailed analytics on internal and external community behavior is a healthy sign of progress in the Enterprise 2.0 sector. Jive announced a similar agreement last summer at the June Enterprise 2.0 conference to integrate SAP BusinessObjects into its SBS platform. With a real-time view of customer and operational data, a connected enterprise is more agile in its ability to share, discuss, and collaborate on key data, thereby yielding more accurate and timely decisions.

After 25 years in business and 5,000 customers in 100 countries, Inmagic is no Enterprise 2.0 startup. Yet, like many vendors in the business of collecting and cataloguing data for years, it sees the new trend toward socializing knowledge highly attractive. Inmagic’s heritage stems from the Knowledge Management and Library Services background. In a 2.0 Adoption Council demo last week, Inmagic demoed Presto, its Social Knowledge Management Platform.

The product takes an inside-out view of data that can be shared in the enterprise. It catalogs and collects digital assets and data in a central repository and then facilitates a social layer to interface with those assets and build a social knowledge network.

What originally got my attention about this product was its SharePoint integration and compatibility. As much as the Enterprise 2.0 die-hards in our community love to diss SharePoint, the truth is Microsoft is the “liquid cement” of office productivity and will not be unseated any time soon in the large enterprise. (For further validation, make sure you didn’t miss this New York Times piece last week on SharePoint.) Established players like Inmagic will continue to reap the rewards of traditional enterprise business as SharePoint continues on its growth trajectory.

As far as the design/UI, the product doesn’t have the sex appeal of some of the 2.0 startup offerings, but I found it especially refreshing that the demo discussion revolved centrally around business drivers. “We feel very strongly that the key to accelerating adoption is to keep the focus on business initiatives,” said Inmagic’s Mike Cassettari, VP Marketing and Business Development.

For a deeper dive into Presto’s inner magic, take a look at Bill Ives’ post. Bill is an expert in knowledge management and enterprise 2.0 which uniquely qualifies him to posit an opinion.

Tomorrow, we’ll be taking a look at another major stakes winner from the SharePoint stables: Tomoye.

[This post was cross-posted from ITSinsider.]

Interest in the 2.0 Adoption Council has been fantastic. Over forty members have filled our ranks. Each of our members has an extremely demanding day job. Educating, motivating, cajoling, rationalizing, bargaining, organizing, tracking, recruiting, and learning are all part of the job skill requirements. The “Internal Evangelist” (IE) has to carefully balance the needs of the business with an incredible responsibility to drive change in the organization with tools and practices that are outside of the comfort zone of most large enterprise employees, not to mention the pockets of organizational resistance predisposed to preserving Enterprise 1.0.

For this reason, I have decided to award an “Internal Evangelist of the Year.” One member of the 2.0 Adoption Council will be selected to exemplify the tenacity, courage, and sheer energy it takes to inspire a large enterprise to embrace the principles and practices of Enterprise 2.0. The award will be announced at the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in San Francisco.

“…the job of the internal evangelist is far, far more difficult. These folks toggle between fighting the good fight every day and then slipping uneasily into a sort of DMZ where they can peek out into the broader community for support and the rejuvenation they need to go on fighting another day. It’s often a thankless job with no clear roadmap for advancement, yet the majority of them do it because they believe in the principles of the 2.0 movement. I celebrate them!”

Please feel free to nominate someone who you believe is deserving of this award. If they’re not a member of the Council already, I will be happy to extend an invite. Refer the individual to me on my LinkedIn profile. We’re still screening candidates via LinkedIn.

Sometime last year, via automated searches for “Enterprise 2.0,” I found myself repeatedly landing on this prolific blogger’s posts: Bertrand DUPERRIN’s Note Pad (caps intentional; that’s how they do it in France). Although sometimes a struggle to glean the intended meaning from his posts as the translations were a little rough from French to English, I stuck with Duperrin and have found his commentary refreshing and insightful. So, blame it on social media, but that’s how I first discovered blueKiwi– the company that employs Duperrin. I’ve since started following @bduperrin on Twitter and have drafted him into my ITSinsider guild of Enterprise 2.0 warriors.

Last week, the 2.0 Adoption Council kicked off our weekly “Demo Thursdays” with a blueKiwi demo. During the demo there were a number of features that distinguished blueKiwi in crowded field of competitors. As I mentioned the clean, nicely designed user interface makes it easy to figure out what to do fairly quickly. The platform is arranged in a people-centric design that channels content into logical groups. In short, the product has all the bells and whistles, but it has even more than I’ve seen from most social platforms. For instance, it includes a fairly sophisticated ideation feature, as well as support for mobile platforms. While searching around, I found a comprehensive blueKiwi review by Jon Husband when the company launched at Web 2.0 SF. Highly recommend that for further investigation.

Certainly in Europe, blueKiwi is an exceptional contender for your social software business. On our demo conference call, we heard blueKiwi described as “the Jive of Europe.” As I’ve been working with Jive SBS at the Council, and have continued to experiment independently with the blueKiwi platform, I’d have to say blueKiwi has a lot to offer comparatively. Once blueKiwi lands a few large U.S. clients, it will be soon thereafter we will hear blueKiwi’s name mentioned alongside Jive, Socialtext, and Telligent as a top-of-mind category contender.

blueKiwi’s ideation module.

I also enjoyed this introductory video from blueKiwi explaining the basic business benefits for social software in general.