A couple of weeks ago a young South African entrepreneur named Mike Stopforth started a Wikipedia entry on “Enterprise 2.0″ and invited a number of people, including me, to help flesh it out.  While I was giving the idea some thought, a Wikipedia cop took it down on the basis, I suppose, that it failed to rise to Wikipedia’s usual charitable standards for inclusion.  Andrew McAfee, the man who coined the “Enterprise 2.0″ label, provides his two cents here.

Here’s mine.  Wikipedia is one of those great ideas that began small with high hopes of inclusiveness and democracy and lots of grassroots enthusiasm for liberating knowledge from the gatekeepers and then grew into the same tight-assed establishment monster that it intended to supplant.  The desire to control is simple human nature and gatekeepers are the inevitable consequence.  Wikipedia is now too big and too successful to take a chance on new ideas.  Forget it, Jake.  It’s Chinatown.

Having said that, the Enterprise 2.0 concept does remain vague and somewhat nebulous, mainly because there is still a lack of solid business cases that could serve as a kind of proof of concept.  The Enterprise Web 2.0 technologies (the stuff I write about here) are still too new to have produced much in the way of business results that might support McAfee’s Enterprise 2.0 thesis, which posits a dramatic organizational and management impact for these technologies within enterprises.  We just aren’t there yet.

These “cases” will be developed over time but the companies who make the software need to start thinking less like geeks with fun toys and more like their potential customers.  They don’t care if it churns out wikis and blogs like a souped-up sausage machine; what does this amazing little collection of algorithms do for me that I’m not doing now?  What are the business benefits?  And don’t say collaboration because that’s too vague.  How does this help make or save money? 

We need some good examples and Enterprise Web 2.0 is here to serve.  If you have a good customer case study, tell me about it and if it’s good enough I’ll write it up here.  Has to be a real company that is using your product and having good results and is willing to talk about it.  Let me know and I’ll put together a mini-customer success story for you. 

(If you want a fuller, more detailed case study, you’ll need to talk to me about money.  Hey, we all got to make a living.)