I attended, and enjoyed Enterprise 2.0 Camp 2 last night at the Gladstone Hotel.

Tomas Purves kicked off the evening with an introduction to the concept of Enterprise 2.0, examples of applications in this space, news from the Office 2.0 conference, business’ position visa via Enterprise 2.0 (paraphrasing: status quo, immediate benefit, cultural shift/emergent behavior). He also introduced the concept of “tacit media” as an alternative to “social media”; I’m not 100% sold on the concept but I’m certainly mulling it over in the back of my mind.

The discussion for the next hour and half mainly centered about the benefits of business would reap from the culture shift that Enterprise 2.0/Tacit Media/Social Media/What Have You would bring to the enterprise.

We could have had this discussion in 1998, with perhaps the enthusiasm around the phrase “paradigm shift” rather than “emergent benefit”.

Most people in the audience at the Gladstone are sold on the benefit of a cultural shift in the Enterprise. I’m skeptical but I’m probably only one of the handful there that are. Businesses are good at making money; ones that are not soon find their desks, chairs and filing cabinets for auction on Saturday mornings. Every year there’s someone knocking at the enterprise door with a new solution for what ails them; some have utility, some are snake oil. Choosing correctly (or not choosing at all) is essential. Without quantification, case studies and success stories, I don’t see the route to closing sales in this market.

I believe that if Enterprise 2.0 ventures (that is, companies selling Enterprise 2.0 technologies) are to succeed, they must pitch their products towards Purves’ “second stage”: getting immediate benefits of using the technology, to either save cash or make more of it. The adventuresome 1% is not enough to sustain a market.

As I see the “emergent story” has a benefit curves that looks like this, making various assumptions about how things work out:

The difficultly, obviously, is pitching going through the trough to get the (potential) peak later in the future. However, if there is an immediate benefit of the product, our curve will look like this:

The beauty of this is that if in fact the emergent benefit is there (and I’m certain there one, for certain classes of organization) it comes for “free” – you don’t have to sell the trough.

I found Greg Van Alstyne’s presentation on Emergent Media to be a mixed bag. The main concept I took away was the concept of seeding; that is, getting the ball rolling on Wikis and other social media to help lead the non-early adopters into making contribution. However, I didn’t see the connection between the emergent behavior and a benefit to the Enterprise. Yes, emergent behavior exists in complex system but the process of creating the behavior itself it is a value neutral proposition – it’s the behavior that emerges that's the point.

Beyond that I found it went more than a little off the track. “Sustainability” may be near and dear to the heart of failed control freaks but is anathema to a bottom-up empowered culture; it is the language of top-down obedience. Nor did I find the analogy of evolution particularly helpful, as evolutionary history is the history of out-of-control expansions, collapses and destruction. Van Alsytne’s collaborator in the audience certainly enjoyed speaking, though his thoughts about the businesses/“cockroach”-analogy or that “the inside and outside are blurring” speak to a … ummm …. a certain lack of exposure to issues that enterprises actually are experiencing or even wish to solve.

Sacha Chua of IBM ended the formal part of the evening with a report on CASCON and what IBM is doing internally with Enterprise 2.0 technologies (being careful not to step over any lines of disclosure). Blogging, social tagging and struggling with multiple competing systems. Hey, that’s not unlike the real world! Having multiple systems isn’t necessarily a bad thing because that will expose IBM development to the integration problems that they’ll be facing externally. Interestingly, IBM seems to be having a better experience with social tagging than other companies are; perhaps this is because of the shear size of the company were “the 1%” gets you 3250 serious early adopters.