The idea of Enterprise 2.0 is now a couple of years old, well into the trough of disillusionment as far as hype cycle position goes, and broad outlines are starting to become clear. So it is not surprising that two books have appeared in the last year that treat the subject broadly, systematically, and without the Kool-Aid that characterized books like Wikinomics, which appeared much earlier in the hype cycle. The first is one by the most usual of suspects, Andrew McAfee, titled, like his original article that coined the term, Enterprise 2.0 (the subtitle though, has changed appropriately, from “The Dawn of Emergent Collaboration” to “New Collaborative Tools for Your Organization’s Toughest Challenges.”)  The second is “Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom” by Matt Fraser and Soumitra Dutta.  The two books are ideal foils to each other. They tackle the left and right brains of the Enterprise 2.0 idea respectively. To a certain extent, they are also evil twins to each other. Which one is better for you?

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I’ve been looking back at some of the video footage from our Enterprise 2.0 Conference this past June in Boston and reminded of our opening keynote address from Jascha Franklin-Hodge called my.barackobama.com: The Secrets of Obama’s New Media Juggernaut . What a great speaker and great way to kick off the conference.

I’m just as excited to hear from Tammy Erickson, our opening keynote speaker for the E2 Conference in San Francisco next week. Tammy was recently added to the global “Thinkers 50” list along with the likes of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates and she focuses on building strategies that will help business succeed.  Enterprise 2.0 is often driven from the ground up, through grass roots efforts that start small and take root across the enterprise.  But the Enterprise 2.0 message and the mandate for business managers is equally important and one that Tammy will deliver loud and clear next week.

See you at the conference next week and in the meantime, please enjoy this past talk from our video archives.

This week Google finally distributed a limited set of invites to its Wave collaboration application. Wave represents a fundamental re-thinking of the way people collaborate and is designed to break the death-grip e-mail still has on communications.

Wave has come up a lot in recent conversations with vendors and end-users alike. Vendors are concerned that Google will emerge as a strong competitor in the unified communications and collaboration market, while enterprise IT architects are still reluctant to embrace Google as an alternative to IBM Lotus and Microsoft, but are enticed by Google’s approach to integrating real-time and non-real-time collaboration.

I tend to think the real impact of Wave won’t be as much a mass adoption by knowledge workers as it will drive new features and innovations to applications including Notes and Outlook. Just as Skype introduced the world to UC, perhaps Wave will do the same for a new paradigm for collaboration.

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.

It’s difficult to miss Dries Buytaert in a crowd.

Standing at least 6′ 3″ tall, his spiky head of blond hair is easily recognizable. Known in the open source world as the founder of Drupal, co-founder and CTO of Acquia and instrumental player in Drupalcon, it’s obvious that Dries is a very clever and busy guy.  I caught up with Dries at the recent OSCON 2009 in San Jose, CA and he graciously took the time to answer a few questions about how he manages to be so successful.

1) You are the founder of the Drupal content management system and CTO/Co-founder of Acquia. How did a Belgian like yourself get involved in CMS?

I was a student at the University of Antwerp in Belgium around 1999. I was doing web development with CGI and Server-Side Includes, but I wanted to learn more about technologies like PHP and MySQL. Also, at the same time, we had the need for an internal messaging system at our student dorm. So, I wrote a simple message board. Then when I graduated, I decided to move my internal message board onto the internet.

After I relaunched my internal message to the public internet as drop.org in 2000, I continued to build on it for a year or so and added a lot of features. More than anything, it was an experimental platform to learn from and apply new web technologies such as RSS feeds, blogging and content and user rating.

As my experiments evolved, they drew the attention of an audience that was also interested in the future of the internet. This audience provided suggestions and was active with state of the art web technologies and they increasingly began providing me with feedback. At a certain time the feedback took on such a level that I thought I should provide the engine to them so they could start their own experimenting and applying their own suggestions to it. This is how it got moved to open source, and also how the community started.

So it was mostly by accident, and it quickly got out of hand.

2) Why did you feel the need to form Acquia and what does Acquia contribute to the Drupal community?

Acquia helps accelerate Drupal usage by contributing to the advancement of Drupal, and by offering products, services, and technical support to simplify the deployment and management of Drupal websites.

As a thriving open source project, Drupal changes at such a rapid rate that it can be challenging to find the most useful and relevant modules, keep systems secure and up to date, and find real-time expertise and support to quickly resolve issues. By reducing or eliminating these issues, Acquia improves the effectiveness of organizations already using Drupal and brings the power of Drupal within reach of more organizations who are exploring Drupal for the first time.

3) There were over 1,400 at Drupalcon in Washington DC, 2009. What is driving this community’s significant growth year over year?

A huge community has grown up around Drupal, with thousands of active contributors to the open source project, including more than 4,000 community-developed modules for extending Drupal functionality. Drupal’s thriving, vibrant ecosystem is the very reason that Drupal is so successful – it is its greatest strength.

4) There are a lot of open source projects out there today. What makes Drupal unique?

Drupal has been a pioneer from the start by embracing new technologies and being on the front lines when it comes to web development.  But what separates Drupal is its modularity – the combination of a core package and then task-specific modules that can be added as needed.

This modularity was part of Drupal’s initial design. I was sort of shocked that most of the other systems didn’t have a modular design — to me, with my background as a computer science student, that felt like a very natural thing to do.

Drupal’s modular design makes it attractive to both technical and non-technical users.  If you look at Content Management Systems, they have eliminated the traditional role of the webmaster.  This role has evolved more into a role of content editor.

My vision for Drupal is to do the same for the developers (role). I think there is a lot of room to eliminate the traditional web developer.  Eliminating might be a bit too strong, but re-define the role of the web developer at least. The way we try to accomplish this in Drupal is with a modular approach so users can build web sites quickly without having to do any programming.  In other words, one does not have to be a true developer to build a feature rich and interactive web site. I hope we can make a big step forward with this in the next five years.

5) Can you name some of the biggest sites that run on the Drupal platform?

A diverse list of organizations are using Drupal including Lifetime Television, MTV UK, Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Brothers Records, New York Observer, Forbes, The Onion, Harvard University, Amnesty International and tens of thousands more.  I believe there are two primary reasons people have chosen Drupal.  The first is the Drupal community – it consists of thousands of passionate, talented people who believe in the future of the Web and invest their time and energy to contribute to the project.  Second, Drupal’s modular architecture makes it a flexible platform to build great websites.

6) What are the most common barriers to open source software adoption in the enterprise?

The biggest barrier is education - people are afraid of things that are unfamiliar.  The good news is that “open source” as a category of technologies is pretty mature in the enterprise - particularly in the data center.  Technologies like Linux, Apache, Eclipse and others are now standard tools in any data center infrastructure.  The next step in this evolution is for business buyers, outside the data center, to adopt solutions built on open source applications, like Drupal.

7) How do you overcome these objections?

This is where Acquia comes in – Acquia gives organizations the confidence they need to adopt Drupal based solutions.  They can access the same level of customer service support and guidance that they have come to expect from proprietary software products – in many cases, better customer service – while taking advantage of the innovation and value of open source Drupal.

8) What’s next for Drupal? Can you share any future plans with us?

We are currently working on Drupal 7.  We are focused on improving Drupal in a number of ways – adding lots of new features in core (e.g. a new database backend, better file and image handling, improved access control, theme system improvements) but also improving usability and scalability.

Longer term, I see tremendous opportunities for the semantic web and search.  For Drupal, this means making Drupal emit structured information. Hundreds of thousands of Drupal sites contain vast amounts of structured data, covering an enormous range of topics, including product information. Unfortunately, that structure is hidden deep in Drupal’s database and doesn’t surface to the HTML code generated by Drupal. As such, search engines can’t pick it up as a product, and they’d fail to include it in their world-wide product database.

Technologies like this disintermediate so many existing websites and organizations that it makes my head spin. It is too great an opportunity for us to pass up on. By adding semantic technology to Drupal core, I think we can make a notable contribution to the future of the web.

9) Is it true that the genesis of the name Drupal was actually a typo? What’s the story there?

Yes. Initially, I wanted to register the site under the Dutch word “dorp” which in English means “village” or “small town”. While registering the domain, I made an error and typed “Drop” instead of “Dorp”. I was shocked to see that Drop.org was still available, so I decided to keep the domain. As such, the first Internet website powered by an online version of Drupal was Drop.org. Drupal did not get its name until I released it as open source software in early 2001.

Thanks again for your time Dries!

Yesterday, I did something that suggested to me that we are at an important tipping point in the psychology of Web 2.0 adoption. Within an hour of hearing the news of Facebook acquiring Friendfeed, I signed up for the latter, using my Facebook login info. I’d known for a year that Friendfeed is a great dashboard service that integrates your social media presence, but I had not joined. Apparently I wasn’t alone. Friendfeed was at one point described by TechCrunch (I think) as ‘a great service nobody will ever use.’  So how do you interpret actions like mine?

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[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.

The Enterprise 2.0 team is gearing up to build the the program for the first annual San Francisco conference coming this November and we’d like to hear your success stories, case studies and the valuable lessons you’ve learned working with E2 tools and technologies in your organization. Submit your proposal through the Call for Papers, open until July 31. We’re looking for sessions and workshop proposals in the following topics:

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Implementing Enterprise 2.0 technologies and approaches can be a key driver of competitiveness and profitability.

However since Enterprise 2.0 sits at the nexus of technology and organizational culture, there can be no one-size-fits-all approach.

Implementing Enterprise 2.0 Report provides detailed practical insights into how to create substantial business value with web technologies, supported by numerous case studies of successful implementation and lessons learned.

Enterprise2Blog partner Ross Dawson has written a comprehensive report on Implementing Enterprise 2.0 and published free chapters for your education.

Use this report to:

1. Gain a clear understanding of Enterprise 2.0 and Web 2.0 in organizations
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4. Establish governance initiatives
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6. Convince executives to take action
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Ross Dawson is globally recognized as a leading futurist, entrepreneur,keynote speaker, strategy advisor, andbestselling author. He is Founding Chairman of four companies: professional services and venture firm Advanced Human Technologies, future and strategy consulting group Future Exploration Network, leading events firm The Insight Exchange, and influence ratings start-upRepyoot.

Wednesday, June 24 12:30 – 4:30 pm

Enterprise2Open (tag #2open) is open to anyone who would like to attend. This open event blends some pre-scheduled content with an open grid where the attendees fill in the sessions they either want to discuss or present themselves. As the official “unconference” of the event, Enterprise2Open is the perfect place to connect with other attendees and share your knowledge and experiences.

To propose a topic and for more details, please visit the Enterprise2Open wiki.

Register for your Free Enterprise2Open pass, which gives you access to all of the conference activities listed on our ‘What’s Free‘ page.

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