John Tropea says people need to understand why they should use Web 2.0 tools in organizations, not just “because everyone else is doing it so I need to as well, and I’ll just use this recipe approach.”

His comments are in reaction to an article in Australian IT – Business yet to harness Web 2.0 – that claims businesses are trying Web 2.0 tools but don’t really understand them or see their value.

The Australian IT article offers little if any substantive information that might help readers better understand why blogs, wikis, social networks, and RSS are so powerful, but Tropea nails it with this one quote:

More than anything, these new tools are the catalyst for a change to a more collaborative culture. We have always wanted to enable a workforce that leverages the social capital, and we can change this way of working now that we have the right tools.

He goes on to say that the rise of Web 2.0 in the workplace is about culture change, not tools:

More than anything it’s about a change of culture in the way you get things done, so it’s more a learning organisation thing, and the tools are the conduit for this culture change…plus the tools are just that, the tools to get things done the new way.

But remember every time we use these tools, it’s about replacing and complementing the tools we currently use, we still do the same work tasks only with new tools, plus these new tools have some unique magic of their own.

Organizations should think about Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 not in terms of just bringing in a bunch of new tools. They should think about:

• Where are the bottlenecks and obstacles to getting things done?
• Can workers easily get access to the information they need in a self-service manner with as little red tape as possible?
• Are workers able to coalesce around common ideas instead of being isolated behind arbitrary boundaries?

These are the big issues that organizations need to address, and the tools are just that – tools – but they can be very powerful solutions if an organization identifies the right problems for them to fix.