The notion of “consumer” software trying to succeed as “mainstream” enterprise software is certainly not a new one. I’m sure this has been happening for a long time, but I’ll bring you back to four or five years when enterprise instant messenger tools and collaboration suites were all the buzz. While enterprise IM (EIM) has seen some success (is something successful if it has its own acronym?) it has not been as a standalone product, with the possible exception of the financial services vertical. Many of these products have been subsumed as part of broader solutions or suites of products and will be likely to remain components of applications from large vendors (IBM/Lotus, Microsoft, Symantec to name a few). The same rules apply to collaboration tools (Groove being the best example). When the Enterprise Content Management sector was hot and growing, it was cool to wrap new features functions on top of baseline document and web content management. No longer.

Today, the really interesting areas of enterprise software involve tools and solutions that allow businesses to leverage existing assets (employees, knowledge) and resources (infrastructure). This brings us back to the Enterprise 2.0. Wikis, blogging tools, and other “2.0” technologies are proliferating because many don’t require significant IT resources (my company, for example, uses enterprise blog software within our professional services organization without IT management). If Enterprise 2.0 is going to succeed as a concept (and more importantly as a set of useful tools) it is going to be this democratization of IT that will drive it.

As Bill Ives writes, broad adoption of innovative technology certainly faces its organizational challenges. We’ve all experienced it at some level, whether from a C-level perspective, a member of the IT organization, or from perhaps the most common perspective, which is that of the end user or knowledge worker. While the C-level has final say on big ticket budget items and IT is focused on undisrupted productivity, it is this large middle group that has the power to drive adoption of innovative, yet simply managed, tools. As in any emerging software segment, the articulation and clear definition of use cases will be critical (I was recently asked “why we blog” – this is an interesting question and should be the topic of another entry).