Oliver Marks blogs about “What is Enterprise 2.0” and what E2.0 means to the corporate IT department - a truly important definition. Getting IT on board the E2.0 bandwagon is the difference between waiting a year for social computing to catch on in your organization and waiting much, much longer. Marks writes that, “At this point it appears that enterprise 2.0 is often seen as a threat to security by most IT department management.” That maybe true, but IT controls some hot commodities that E2.0 evangelists inside corporations want to get their hands on - SSO (most commonly, AD), and a friendly firewall policy, to name a few.

Most importantly, E2.0 foreshadows the eventual transformation of IT from the people who provide your desktop applications to the people who run the machinery that keeps all the user-provisioned, in the cloud apps talking to one another. We all know utility computing is the future - where does IT fit? It becomes a provider of shared services, provisioning user profiles and authentication out to cloud apps selected by end users. Moving to this model will let IT focus on what it does best, and let users focus on what they do best - making their own decisions about what technologies work best for them.