What do Enterprise 2.0 and Mrs. Robinson have in common?

I’m going for seduction, but the real answer is a good post by Mike Gotta an analyst at the Burton Group. Mike brought up some good advice for e2.0 evangelists: the next time you’re touting your wares, add a footnote on “security, identity, records management, integration, interoperability and other concerns.” I’ve been somewhat in denial on the security issues related to e2.0 solutions, but perhaps it’s time to face the music. Each vendor addresses these issues in different ways, but it’s worth a mention on how you’re going to address these issues if, God forbid, the solution takes off virally through popular adoption within the enterprise.

Something else I realized while reading this post is how young this market is. Andrew McAfee named the baby “Enterprise 2.0″ in the spring of this year– we’re about 9 months into the sector–therefore, extending the metaphor… the baby isn’t even born yet.

At Office 2.0, there were 54 product vendors that showed up clamoring for attention. And considering how the threshold for building and launching enterprise 2.0 companies is so low, we could be looking at hundreds of vendors in this category before the baby starts to crawl. This week, I noticed that CMP changed its “Collaborative Technologies Conference” to “Enterprise 2.0” further validating the sector.

So, get ready to pass out the cigars… the baby is healthy and growing. But as we start to consider care and feeding, let’s make sure he’s safe at home.

Mike Gotta:

While it is important to enable users themselves to construct their own communication, information sharing and collaborative environments, they need to do so within policies and structures that do not put the enterprise at risk. And that’s a key message I want to get across with this post.