Wikis have become more useful than e-mail for work collaboration

I both smiled and frowned upon this article in Network World. While it sees and supports web 2.0 in the enterprise, it’s trying to be not too pushy, citing the old arguments of ROI, security etc. .. to close with another fine balanced conclusion, which I really like:

It’s kind of a no-brainer for CIOs who spend a lot of money putting in these highly engineered proprietary applications to do stuff they can now do with wikis and blogs at a tiny percentage of the cost

Contrast this with another quote from the same article:

On the other hand, it’s sometimes hard to get funding for Web 2.0 projects, because management teams at some companies aren’t convinced the new tools deliver real business value

Now what, do they deliver value or not? Anyway, if the “I” in ROI is kept small, it’s easy to reach a decent ROI. And the effects Enterprise 2.0 may bring aren’t smallish in any case, as collaborative technologies like wikis support and ease knowledge work that is hardly supported by traditional means. Start by calculating the costs of your email based collaboration style – these go unnoticed sometimes.