In response to yesterday’s post on Web 3.0/Enterprise 3.0 a reader, Mehnaz, points to a discussion that is already taking place around Enterprise 3.0.

Sramana Mitra provides insights on both Web 3.0 and Enterprise 3.0. The forces that are shaping W/E3.0 are already set in motion, she said. Interest in Software as a Service to address various IT and application requirements is growing rapidly, as is the evolution to the Extended Enterprise.

Thus, the way to look at Enterprise 3.0 is:

E3.0 = SaaS + EE

Sramana observes that “the modern enterprise is no longer one, monolithic organization. It is actually a confederation of customers, partners, suppliers, outsourcers, distributors, resellers, and other kinds of entities. “Collaboration” and “sharing” become the key words in making this all work.

Borrowing from the SOA lexicon, I often have referred to the emerging business model we see as the “loosely coupled enterprise,” in which a corporation acts as a broker of services that are brought together to fulfill a specific customer of market need. A couple of years back, I quoted the observations of Mohan Sawhney, professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, who pointed out that the best-run companies may not be producers themselves, but networks of producers, orchestrated by a front-end broker of services.

For example, some mobile phone companies provide a good example of this orchestrator role, in that “they don’t do anything themselves, they just collect the money,” Sawhney said. Even Cisco comes close to this orchestrator model: “85 percent of Cisco’s products are never touched by a Cisco employee,” he also said.

In her recent post, Sramana cites some more examples of the Enterprise 3.0 paradigm:

“The salesforce needs to share leads with distributors and resellers. The Product Design team needs to share CAD files with parts suppliers. Customers and vendors need to share workspace often. Consultants, contractors, outsourcers often need to seamlessly participate in the workflow of a project, share files, upload information. All this, across a secure, seamlessly authenticated system. Few of these Extended Enterprise stakeholders are inside the firewall. They don’t necessarily have accounts in the Enterprise IT network, posing challenges and creating friction in the workflow.”

Sramana cautions that it’s going to take some time, and pain, to address the needs of the emerging Extended Enterprise. “Companies are facing the full impact of globalization today, and yet, their IT systems were designed long time back, without any provision for managing this Extended Enterprise architecture. Thus, if you do come up with an architecture that successfully manages the workflow of EE, focused on a specific application, chances are, you have hit some ready CIO painpoint, and therefore, appetite.”

Sramana also provides a formula for Web 3.0:

Web 3.0 = (4C [content, commerce, community, context]+ P [personalization] + VS [vertical search]).