Charlie Rose interviewed SAP co-CEO Léo Apotheker and Harvard Business School professor Andrew McAfee in December, and the interview aired last night.

The two discuss the role enterprise software plays in “making organizations tick” (Apotheker) and how it can help in bad eceonomic times.

According to ZDNet’s Oliver Marks:

This TV appearance is a fascinating indication of how much more seriously Enterprise 2.0 is being taken in the current economic predicament.

Why take Enterprise 2.0 tools more seriously in bad economic times? Here’s what they do for an organization, as McAfee says in the interview:

What Leo and his colleagues in the enterprise software industry do is build process factories for us. So instead of turning out products, we turn out business processes like the ones he was talking about. They’re very flexible, very configurable, so even if you and I buy the same basic factory from him, we’re going to do very different things with it. If I do smarter things than you, I’ll get ahead over time.

During the bad times, these tools can help companies do that smarter work that will put them even further ahead while others are figuring out how to survive. It requires courage on the part of corporate leadership to bring in new tools, loosen limits on how employees communicate with each other and the outside world, but it pays dividends when that flexibility enables them to develop the better business processes that keep the organization healthy.