There’s a lot of discussion taking place about the meaning of the term Enterprise 2.0. Dennis Howlett started with Enterprise 2.0: what a crock, and numerous others have responded. Dennis pointed out the problem with trying to apply a label that only insiders know and use:

One of the big problems I perceive is the insistence on adding 2.0 to technology that in isolation has plenty of utility but only once people have found use cases.

James Dellow offered a particularly good response, with two examples:

A legal firm in Australia created a mashup called PeopleFinder that helps to reduce the number of calls to voicemail and shipping company Wallem saves money on fuel costs using Enterprise RSS as part of a system for communicating with their ships. While this probably isn’t what most people think of as Enterprise 2.0, it does demonstrate that Web 2.0 technology has real benefits once you work out how to apply it to business problems.

What’s important here is the real work people are doing to introduce emergent technology and make strong cases for using it to solve real business problems. In December 2007, I wrote First rule of Fight Club Enterprise 2.0? You don’t talk about Enterprise 2.0 in response to the round of discussion taking place at that time. Here’s what I said back then:

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.

Just remember this: wikis long predate any discussion of the terms web 2.0, enterprise 2.0, and social media. Those are recently-created buzzwords. The wiki has a long history of use, starting with its development in 1995 as a counterpart to centralized code management tools used by developers to work collectively and keep team efforts organized. There are concrete uses for a wiki (see 8 Things You Can do With an Enterprise Wiki for examples), specific ways to catalyze and lead adoption of the tool (see Wikipatterns for examples), and concrete ways to measure its utility in your organization – Return on Adoption (you’ll have to contact me for details on this one – it’s what I specialize in as a consultant to organizations).