Social Glass

I work for a large, traditional consulting company and when I read Jevon McDonald’s post about his predictions for Enterprise 2.0 in 2007, particularly the part that says:

An all star team of consultants will form who will be one of the few groups able to lead companies through a process of Adoption, Integration and Normalization of social software toolkits and the re development of corporate org charts to address the new, flattened, world. The major consulting firms will come out with their own consulting “products” around Enterprise 2.0, but they will struggle with it as their best consultants will break off to join looser and more creative consulting groups, now that they have access to the necessary low-cost tools.

I thought he might be right, us Enterprise 2.0 enthusiasts may have to abandon our traditional consulting organizations for those that are more receptive to new, cutting edge ideas - ideas without proven revenue streams… yet.

But I started evangelizing Enterprise 2.0 internally, and to my surprise my co-workers got it and became very enthusiastic about the possibilities. When properly presented Enterprise 2.0 can be very compelling to traditional companies.

So now I’m looking into building an Enterprise 2.0 ecosystem for my group and find myself consulting consultants. And one of the main requirements I’m getting is interoperability with Microsoft Office. Many companies store their intellectual property in Powerpoint presentations and Microsoft Word documents. The Enterprise 2.0 solution must play nicely with Microsoft or else it will fail.

Conceptually the Enterprise 2.0 solution will be the “source of truth” - the repository of unstructured intellectual property. Microsoft Office programs will be a delivery mechanism for content, but not the content repository. Knowledge workers, when preparing a formal deliverable, will export the content they need into Word, Powerpoint etc. and hand it over to the client. To me this seems a good middle ground, a tactical measure to start weening people off MS Office.

I’ll keep you posted on how this all progresses.