I recently spoke with Andrew McAfee of the Harvard Business School, and I am happy to say that he will be presenting at next week's Collaborative Technologies Conference 2006 in Boston.

His article in the Sloan Management Review highlighted the term "Enterprise 2.0" (although he wasn't the first to coin it), and he has continued his inquiry into that topic at his blog, where he defines the term in the following way:

Now, since I was the first to write extensively about Enterprise 2.0 I feel I'm entitled to define it:

'Enterprise 2.0' is the use of freeform social software within companies.

'Freeform' in this case means that the software is most or all of the following:

• Optional
• Free of up-front workflow
• Egalitarian, or indifferent to formal organizational identities
• Accepting of many types of data

'Social' means that there's always a person on at least one end of the wire with Enterprise 2.0 technologies. With wikis, prediction markets, blogs, del.icio.us, and other Web 2.0 technologies with clear enterprise applications people are doing all the interacting and providing some or all of the content; the IT is just doing housekeeping and/or bookkeeping.

At the conference, Andrew will provide a progress report of the use of these social tools in the enterprise, and discuss what companies have learned from their initial experiences with Enterprise 2.0.