You may say, "sure, that's the CEO's role." True. But the CEO cannot afford to spend too much time on it. The CEO needs someone more dedicated to the effort — a Chief Collaboration Officer. So who should that be? We're not proposing a new person — yet another (expensive) executive in the C-suite. We think that a current C-level executive should assume the mantle. Here are five candidates:

• The current CIO. This is a perfect area for the Chief Information Officer to go beyond IT, step up, and take an enterprise-wide view. If you're a CIO looking to broaden your role and drive value across the company, this is your opportunity.

• The current HR head. Good collaboration requires the right incentives, performance evaluations, promotion criteria, and people development. So it's only natural for the head of HR to take on the CCO role; that entails going beyond HR issues and working with others, such as the CIO, to craft a holistic solution.

• The current COO. Of course, if your company has a COO that oversees many parts of the business, adding the Chief Collaboration Officer role is a natural extension.

• The current CFO. Now, this is less obvious. Why get the numbers person on board here? Well, collaboration is first and foremost about creating economic value; it's a strategic search for good cross-company projects. Many CFOs also oversee the strategy department, so why not add cross-company strategic activities to the portfolio?

Interesting point, also with regards to leadership concepts of E 2.0
Also topic of our opening keynote at the #e20s

A number of scholars have argued that if an actor's partner in a network form of organization possesses considerable legitimacy or status, then the actor may derive legitimacy or status through the affiliation. This legitimacy or status may in turn have a number of positive economic benefits for the actor, ranging from survival to organizational growth to profitability. For example, in a study of daycare centers, Baum & Oliver (1992) find that a tie to a legitimate institutional actor, such as a church or governmental entity, has a positive effect on the life chances of an organization. In a study of the investment banking industry, Podolny & Phillips (1996) find that the higher the status of a bank's management partners in underwriting syndicates at time t, the greater its status growth between time t and t + 1. This enhanced status, in turn, has positive economic advantages for the organization (Podolny 1993).

The above cited statement from page 8 of the linked research paper considers that the legitimacy of network nodes that I am related to increase the importance and trustworthiness of my information. I asked myself whether this is this still valid for 21st century organisations running on social networks? My answer so far: Yes and no! - I think taht my importance within the network is also a function of the legitimacy and status of my network nodes (aka members of my social graph) - but (!) the relation to this nodes must be an active and for everbody to be recognizable one and the legitimacy of my network nodes is not a function of position, title or academic degree but of their contribution to the network. And thus the legitimacy of my network nodes is not the key factor for my own importance and legitimacy - instead my contributions carry also much of the weight. (Related to this: Blog post by Gary Hamel "The Facebook Generation vs. the Fortune 500" - http://blogs.wsj.com/management/2009/03/24/the-facebook-generation-vs-the fortune-500/) I am sure we will get into more depth on this at one of our keynote sessions at E20 SUMMIT about the organisational setup of E20 projects with JP Rangaswami, Franck La Pinta and Joachim Niemeier.

1. Social-enabled intranet lets you convert alienated employees into a solid team motivated to contribute to business performance. Once employees see their opinion and input is valued, they will keep exploring new opportunities and find their voices to make useful suggestions that will improve the organization’s market understanding and lead to a better market position.

2. Discover the talents in your team and perform better idea management that will help in finding new business opportunities that would hardly materialize under a traditional management structure. More bottom-up generation of ideas and feedback on current methods is not reduces the rigidness of orders from the top, but also capitalizes on the insight held at all levels.

3. Broadcast your corporate values to employees, making them strong brand bearers and enhancing their business involvement. An intranet provides the perfect chance to improve the orientation process for new personnel so that they adapt optimally in the corporate environment. Organizations can conduct effective training and certification using ready-to-go tools and therefore more successfully translate new processes, improvements and innovations into the general structure.

4. Accumulate knowledge in a centralized repository that enables employees to share experience and find better ways to solve mission critical tasks. This way you will say goodbye to inefficient inherited collaboration procedures based on network storage silos and e-mail boxes that limit knowledge continuity and availability as well as posing the risk of information leakage and loss.

5. The younger generation is native to social media. There is hardly any sense in fighting this fidelity; rather, it is a new opportunity for your business to connect to the right people and build brand awareness to a larger audience. With the proper social technologies in place, the intranet will harness the social dimension of employees and put it at your service for better internal collaboration. Don’t fight the social dimension, leverage it for your business.

There are lots of other opportunities an Enterprise 2.0-enabled intranet solution can bring to your business. The market is at the threshold of mass adoption and the early adopters will have a huge competitive advantage by transforming traditional vertical management into a horizontal structure. The social dimension is the perfect chance to enhance business performance by harnessing team spirit. Collective intelligence should never be underestimated. And there are many practical and affordable tools that can help you put it to work for you.

By Denis Zenkin (bitrix)

Observing ants brought a few thoughts to my mind:

• Classical business rely on work hierarchy, segmentation, specialization and competition to execute
• Ants show us that equal individuals working collaboratively, without central command (well, there is a queen, but she doesn't seem to be very dictatorial), can execute tasks that are far beyond the ability (or even the understanding) of each individual
• Are we wired to collaborate and share information like ants seem to be? I believe we are "social", but to a lesser degree than ants are.
• The successful implementation of social business models will depend on our ability to learn some of the lessons ants can offer.

There are quite a lot of discussions about the changing design of the organization and the forms of leadership within socially enhanced environments. In the recent days some nice posts and publications appeared about the comparison of the organization of ants with dezentralized working systems. A good start is the contribution of Marcio Saito (also with links to the referred other articles)

From Barthox' Tumble

But talking about the Enterprise 2.0 "evolution" we also have to distinguish between the E20 reality and the E20 visions - as defined by the evangelists in this field. For the E20 reality I would say that (at least for the German
area) the projects around the topic of Enterprise 2.0 are not yet spinning the big wheel. They are not starting with the objective to change and transform the whole enterprise, but to enhance and improve specific areas of the enterprise by the use of new forms of collaboration and knowledge sharing. Therefore these projects are also not always titled as E20 projects. The cultural change process is not the key objective of these projects but is one of the implicit effects that go along with the success of these projects.

The visionary notion of E20 is already defined on a wider scope - including the transformation of the business model (aka Open Innovation) and the integration of the customer and partner in collaborative approaches (aka SocialCRM). But for the most E20 practioneers these approaches are out of their scope.

So as a conclusion I would say the topic of Enterprise 2.0 is "in between".

Well - this is my view. What about yours?