The following is a response to Dennis Howlett's "Enterprise 2.0 What a Crock" ZDNet post (ZDNet login continually is broken for me, so I am posting here).

I like this take. But, the big thing most organizations are looking to solve is the horrendous platform that is called the intranet. Most of my work with companies is with those who have organizations where people can't find or refind anything on their intranet and much of the information sharing is through e-mail with is equally problematic.

Access to publish and share as well as being able to be on the benefit side of this, is what most of the Enterprise 2.0 tools aim to solve.

My work is mostly with companies who have 6 months to 1 year with these internal social tools, but they have yet to get the expected results. This is most often because they problems they thought they could solve with the E 2.0 tools were based on what was happening with early adopters on the web. The tools they deployed didn't fit with real people's needs, expectations, nor fears. The assumptions around how people interact and use these newer tools that get out of the way (no more 20 required fields to input one sentence in a lessons learned repository).

The problems for information sharing, retention, and aggregation are real. The E 2.0 tools are starting to get there for regular people. But the understanding for most around this space have not caught up to grasping what is hype and what has solid potential for providing value to the organization as well as the people working in it.