(Originally written 20 Dec; the title draws on this meme from Fight Club) Earlier today, I saw a great tweet from Dennis Howlett. A few hours later a colleague IMed me a link to an excellent cartoon from Oliver Widder, that linked to this post from Larry Dignan: Web 2.0 in the enterprise: Are you prepared?. Back on twitter, I saw this headline from Jevon MacDonald: Enterprise 2.0: Where the f$#@ is my market?.

Here’s Dennis’s tweet:

“The tools are exposing the lack of change in many orgs. That’s where the convo needs to go IMO. That’s where the tough work gets done.”

and Oliver’s cartoon:

So what’s the connection between all of these?

We shouldn’t let “Enterprise 2.0″ devolve into a meaningless buzzword that people just throw around. As Dennis says, the tough work (where tough = a very rewarding challenge) is figuring out how to make changes that have little to do with tools and a lot to do with attitudes. And the key to that, as Jevon says, is to focus on real, specific problems and how to solve them:

What specific problems in your organization could benefit from a blog-based approach, or under what circumstances would a wiki solve a real headache….When you find or solve a problem then you should talk about it not in terms of Enterprise 2.0, but in terms of an agile, low-cost approach. This makes sense to a lot more people.

Larry’s post continues on this theme by looking at IBM’s approach to building mashups, testing them for security, stability, etc., in a controlled environment, then graduating them to larger use once they’re ready:

IBM’s Web 2.0-ish apps are reside in its innovation toy box. These pups aren’t rolled out across the enterprise, says Cherbakov. That’s a nice strategy as it keeps these mashups in an area where a) they can be improved; and b) they can be quarantined if something goes to hell in a hand basket.

The bottom line here is that real, tangible, explain-able solutions are what really matters, not buzzspeak. Enterprise 2.0 is a fine term for those of us who know what it means and want to speak in shorthand amongst ourselves, but we shouldn’t confuse others who just need solutions they can understand and justify to the boss.