But, I want to make a comment in defense of the IT department, or at least building on the point you made that the drifting satellites have “been commissioned and abandoned by other inhabitants of the planet.”

In the desire to make a change, it’s easy to look to technology to fix the things that are broken, and then blame them when they don’t. But most problems in a company of any size aren’t related to the technology but the culture and process.
We’re going through a technology change at my workplace now, so I’m seeing how painful it is first-hand, and we aren’t a giant corporation.

Implementing new technology requires changes in long-standing procedures. The response of “But this is how we’ve always done it” is has a lot of inertia. Especially when the new change is short-term harder for long-term pay off. People don’t want to learn a new work routine, learn a new place to find information, learn a new way to do their old tasks.
Now, I’m not saying that people are closing their eyes and avoiding learning anything new. They just don’t want to learn a new process for an old skill.

The key for enterprise social software has been mentioned in Oliver’s comment above.
First, a top-down approach to selecting tools that can be implemented holistically, with an enterprise purpose and strategy.
Second, tapping into the ground-level passion and using the tools to connect those people.
Then companies can begin looking out to the stars.

Communities

In the real world people build communities to help each other – I’m pathetically addicted to old cars for example (which is a great way to stay poor incidentally), and am part of a wonderful community of similarly afflicted folks all over the world. We can’t wait to help each other out finding widgets, explaining stuff and on and on. I can bust my knuckles on a Saturday night on some mechanical problem – air, gas, spark – why won’t it run? …post before sleep and have answers from Australia, England, Tennessee the following morning by people who’ve been there and done that. This is the promise for enterprises – I leverage that expertize, have a bit more knowledge and move rapidly on with the project.

Enterprise Collaboration

Corporations are cold blooded, darwinian places and your hilarious post paints a great cartoon of just some the pecking order and rivalries…
The reality – as I am intimately familiar with – is that there is a great fear of change. Employees will almost always err on the side of caution/cowardise to protect their jobs, and the rivalries and tensions that build up between people and departments we all now can be astonishingly perverse.

Like sharks corporations have to keep moving forward or die and that tends to be the driving force for change. There’s going to be tipping points where opportunity overcomes fear that will encourage 2.0 collaboration.

Despite all the happy talk about ground up innovation from the minions (for example Simon Revell at Pfizer UK, who has a great presentation on ground up adoption I saw at Office 2.0 last year) I believe this ‘freestyle’ approach in bigger corps doesn’t scale – what’s needed is clear decision making, followed by clear succinct direction, goals and objectives from the top of the company on how everyone is going to use the new infrastructure.

The ad hoc, freestyle ‘try it and see’ approach tends to result in internecine warfare between groups, triage management styles and offline rivalries moving online as everything scales up. Not to mention a wild west of content in wikis etc.

This is one of the things that is really hurting the enterprise 2.0 space right now – there are no clear patterns or models yet, but an awful lot of confusing and immature noise about it out there. I’ve started blogging on this very topic but seem to have written more here than on my new blog!

Great post Sam