Enterprise 2.0 goes mainstream!

Prof. Andrew McAfee reports that Honeywell is rolling out a Web 2.0 Enterprise solution from ConnectBeam . This application provides the capability for Honeywell employees to tag content, both internal and external; these tags can then be used to help improve internal search results and support knowledge discovery. This is certainly very cool and an extremely positive development that bodes well for social corporate solutions.

I worked at Honeywell for several years in the early 90s (yes, I feel old now!) - the atmosphere was classic "large Engineering company", very focused on solving complex and specialized problems for sophisticated customers, but pretty conservative in the adoption of new technology. This was mostly a matter of necessity: focusing on building the control systems for airliners and refineries does not exactly encourage you to take risks on the underlying technology. The merger with Allied-Signal turned Honeywell into a corporate giant, a member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average, with over $30B in annual revenues. Which makes it even more impressive, in my opinion, that they're already rolling out Enterprise 2.0 technology "behind the firewall"; you have to applaud the initiative!

You can read some of the details on Rich Hoeg's blog . Others have also been writing about this, including Dennis Howlett and Social Glass.

I suspect that in the future, this point will be seen to represent a milestone in the overall life-cycle of this set of technologies; Enterprise 2.0 has indeed arrived, validating the orginal visions of Ross Mayfield , Puneet Gupta et al!

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