Martin LaMonica over at C|Net has written a great article entitled Web 2.0 meets the enterprise.

Here are some highlights:

• "Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs and AJAX are starting to show their potential behind corporate firewalls, analysts said."
• IBM is introducing an attempt at the Web Office space called QEDWiki.
• "the grassroots direct-marketing techniques of the consumer world are starting to be used to tout enterprise software"
• "Blogs and wikis are starting to move into businesses as a simpler and lightweight way to do collaboration," said Anne Thomas Manes, an analyst at the Burton Group.
• Ray Lane, former president of Oracle and now a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, said "The entire software industry made one huge mistake in the late 1990s--it focused on buyers and not users"

That last quote in Martin's article, the one by Ray Lane is the most important of all.

To date, the only large company focusing on empowering end users in the enterprise space has been Microsoft. The search engines are tangentially providing services to the same people, but they did not set out to do that. Oracle sold to IT, BEA sold to IT, every little IM vendor or speciality trading system vendor sold to IT. Microsoft sold directly to the end business user.

And the fantastic lack of competition has meant that business end users have literally had ZERO new types of tools in 10 years.

Here is the list of what knowledge workers in most enterprise environments use today:

1. Word
2. Excel
3. Power Point
4. Some power users like Visio and Access
5. Email on Outlook or Notes
6. The web, but only for reading information

We will is fast changing times! Baloney! Enterprise Users have been stuck with the same boring limited tools for 10 years.

Corporate America, Enterprise Europe and Big Business Japan are awash with six figure MBAs who spend 50% of their time cutting and pasting between Word and Excel files. They spend another 40% of their time answering an endless chain of CC to CYA emails. That leaves 10% left for these brilliant capable people to add value. And I really do mean that they are brilliant. IT shops that assume their end users are idiots are not going to partner with their clients to them get to the right solution.

This sad set of circumstances is caused by the tyranny of the Waterfall system development methodology.

Waterfall powered IT starts with the question "What process are you trying to automate?"

I have news for IT shops that follow the Waterfall approach. Knowledge workers are not factory workers. There is no process to automate. These people are constantly evolving the way they work to deal with new situations. That's why their requirements are always changing. Companies can not afford to freeze scope in today's business environment, because the only way to compete and stay profitable in today's business environment is through constant change and innovation.

Instead, ask them "What kind of tools do you need to build your own solution?"

Inevitably, getting these tools right will be an ongoing iterative process involving Agile design.