Thanks for sharing your thoughts on my comment. We, for example, work with a open source, but scalable and stable, behind the firewall platform for internal collaboration. We do offer it at sub 20 K price points for a Proof Of Concept period that is mutually acceptable with the enterprise. When I said small groups, I meant it to be more of a POC use case than the number of users. For eg: We encourage usage for internal collaboration in communication between large project groups in enterprises that are geographically widespread. Internal communication and collaboration being the start point, users do get an opportunity to figure out a use case in a particular workflow (With the assistance of strategy inputs and consulting, like you mentioned) and this is when the concepts of ROI for that enterprise begins to take shape. This is when specific use cases and custom solutions are better visualized on the platform. The platform in itself, need not be discontinued, just because it is open source, ofcourse, assuming that it does address all other enterprise grade concerns.

When I say this, I compare it to today's enterprise upfront investments in sharepoint at a huge price for the platform itself. The ROI in such cases becomes hard to justify and enterprises have ended up using it as mere document repositories and communication platforms, leading to adoption issues. Scaring the enterprise CIO from working out further ROI justifications.

It is tough for enterprises to come up with specific use cases upfront, as most of the users do not even get a full grasp of what enterprise 2.0 can do for them, unless they experience it in someway or the other. Like Jeff mentions in his comments below, some of the enterprises have figured out use cases in sales enablement and customer service. But surely, these are oft repeated use cases and not the only ones which inspire imagination across a broad spectrum of possibilities.

Surely, enterprise 2.0 has much more potential to offer if you give enterprises a way to discovering them with the help of their own internal users, strategists and consultants, without worrying about ROI right at the beginning.

Culture is definitely hard and slow, it's not easy to go into a company and change decades of thinking. This is why I think we need to focus not on completely revamping how a business works but integrating new methodologies with old ones. You are dealing with very interesting issues and scenarios. I think the best proof of concept for collaboration already exists in terms of how individuals use social networks already. Why not conduct a brief survey amongst company team members? Ideally you obviously want more and more people to use the new tools and technologies but success depends on scale. If you take a small percentage of the company, say 1,000 people then only a small subset of that group are going to contribute, then in order for it to be useful they need to be contributing to things that other people find relevant. This would be a interesting conversation to have.

An interesting challenge in our discussions has been identifying a scale-limited POC that's still relevant to the business (ie, has some real ROI). If it's the sales engineers and professional services guys in the field who need access to subject matter experts from across the company, what % of the company needs to be in the pilot?

Jacob, thanks for digesting the report and asking some good questions. This was a great post.