Bill Ives points to two IDC papers on Enterprise 2.0. They’re funded by Serendipity, a software company, but anyway, it’s interesting stuff, if only because IDC papers get wide circulation and have credibility.

One is called “Getting Results by Empowering the Information Worker: What Web 2.0 Offers Beyond Blogs and Wikis” and is basically a brief and nicely laid out executive summary … you’ve got to register, but the papers are free.

Here’s the introduction for a start:

Like a symphony conductor presiding over an orchestra, enterprise workers complete their daily tasks by processing many pieces of diverse information, and then combining them in a meaningful way. This “orchestration of data” is becoming increasingly difficult, as organizations store more and more data (for performance analysis, compliance, and so on). Furthermore, each type of data is stored, managed, and viewed through a different application, each with its own login, password, and user interface. Consequently, employees spend more time searching, accessing, retrieving, and then using the information to do their jobs. New applications purport to streamline this process, but are usually deployed in business silos, with little or no coordination between business teams. Workers must still access multiple applications to complete a task. The burden on the enterprise information worker intensifies while productivity suffers.

Furthermore, information workers also rely on information stored outside the enterprise network. As business processes become more dependent on real-time feedback, the amalgamation of enterprise business data with publicly available data, in a meaningful and contextual manner, is becoming m ore im portant… and difficult.