It’s Saturday June 16, 7.20pm here in New Zealand, and I’m 24,000 ft above ground on my way from my home in Christchurch to Auckland, and then through to Los Angeles (where I meet the Macless one), and then on to Boston for Enterprise 2.0: The Collaborative Technologies Conference. I’m really looking forward to it. I have a couple of things to lead at the conference — the IT Manager 2.0 pre-conference workshop/tutorial on Monday 18th, and the LaunchPad event on the main stage on Wednesday 20th. I really liked how Andrew McAfee framed up his attendance: I’m going to go, I’ll deliver my presentation, and then I’m going to shut up and listen and learn (paraphrased okay, no Internet up here). And the same goes for me.

For my own benefit, I want to write out the perspective that I carry into this conference regarding “Enterprise 2.0” collaboration offerings.

• The governance strategy is key … There’s no magic bullet in the technology of enterprise 2.0 … but rather the organizational magic is in the philosophy of openness with which they are implemented. The new technologies of the enterprise 2.0 wave — wikis, RSS, blogs, and more — are just new ways of facilitating interaction, communication and collaboration between people. You can get the benefits of enterprise 2.0 — because it’s about governance and implementation approach — with existing collaboration technologies.
• The technology is improving … The technology of enterprise 2.0 is rapidly improving, and there’s a lot of innovation coming forward, both from the incumbent enterprise collaboration vendors (IBM, Microsoft) and a plethora of start-up vendors.
• Incumbent vendors have the upper hand … Within the enterprise, the incumbent vendors will retain the upper hand, because they have (a) the relationships with people and decision makers in organizations, (b) the channels to market and business partnerships in place, and (c) the financial stability that enterprise customers crave when making software investments.
• IT will re-assert authority … Much of the experimentation with 2.0 technologies and approaches in the enterprise is being driven by line-of-business managers, or power users. As IT learn more, they will take back authority over these tools, for good or for bad. It’s the same thing that’s happened / happening with instant messaging … “rogue users” started using it (bottom-up adoption), and increasingly it’s being seen as part of the IT infrastructure.

So that’s where I start from. I’m going to listen and learn.