On Tuesday evening, Serena sponsored an event at the prestigious Churchill Club of Silicon Valley, an exclusive forum of business and technology executives.  The theme for the event, which had close to 200 attendees, was "From Dilbert to Dude: Succeeding with Web 2.0 in the Enterprise."  On the panel were representatives from Best Buy, Oracle, Avenue A/Razorfish, and yours truly; Charlene Li from Forrester was moderating.

Our contribution revolved around our use of Facebook as the corporate intranet, which as we now know is still quite unique and controversial.  Best Buy told their story about "Blue Shirt Nation"; a collaborative application that unifies the 140,000 store employees (average age 19 years; 60% attrition among those who don't participate and less than 14% for those that do.)  It all started as an app under a desk and with the support of their CMO became a phenomenon in the Web 2.0 world.  Oracle talked about mix.oracle.com, a social tool that was developed under a desk as well and now serves as a way for them to better determine what features to build in theor products based on voting and vouching.  And finally, Avenue A/Razorfish discussed how they as a consulting company solved their knowledge management issues by using their own cut of Wikipedia to build their own encyclopedia - under a desk first as well.

What was striking was how fast the mentality towards Web 2.0 is changing both in the organizations on the panel as well as those in the audience, which included representatives of some very large companies in Silicon Valley.  Whereas a year ago doing a Web 2.0 "thing" was considered a rogue activity that started under a desk, it now has become a fact of life and an imperative to not only attract new employees and satisfy the millenials, but first and foremost to build a better business.  And, what struck even Charlene Li was how few IT departments "get it" and embrace it with open arms.  In her book Groundswell (I highly recommend it) she cites many examples and virtually none started in IT...  Time to get on board my friends!

Paul Krill from InfoWorld was there and you can read his article for an independent view.