During the Office 2.0 conference, the Enterprise Irregulars sat down with Charlene Li and G. Oliver Young of Forrester. It was an amazing session.

It is one thing to get passionate enterprise bloggers writing away in a back room. It is quite a different thing to sit them round in a circle, give them a beer, and directly ask them to debate some tough questions.

Charlene asked what are the myths of Office 2.0. Here's what we came up with:

1. Myth #1: The anarchy on the open net is going to translate into chaos internally. Simply put, if an internal blogger writes something that is dumb, they suffer the consequences of looking stupid in front of their colleagues. If they right something that breaks HR policy guidelines, or causes harm in other ways, they are likely to get fired. There is also a second aspect to this; more subtle and more important. On the open Internet, a blog can be about anything. Internally, blogs, for example, are likely to have a specific business purpose. Such as a project blog. See Real Enterprise Web 2.0 Scenarios – Projects
2. Myth #2:Value is locked within the silo. Too many mid level managers are local maximizers. They believe passionately that there is huge value in their little silo. "This company would be nothing if we didn't process the accounts payable on time". The truth is that things like accounts payable can be out sourced, and what counts is the whole company working as a team. In fact, in many instances, the CEO can see that cross silo teaming is one of the easiest ways to add true value. For example, major banks know that selling more to existing clients is the cheapest way to increase sales. Before you get value out of Enterprise Web 2.0 tools, you have to realize that value is not locked in the silo.
3. Myth #3: Microsoft is doing nothing. I believe that Office 2.0 or Enterprise Web 2.0 is all productivity tools that support emergence behavior. Check out: Enterprise 2.0 = Emergence Software. Microsoft is building new tools to support this. Most promising is a new tool called Excel Services. If you can built a spreadsheet, you can now build a web based application that, at least, does business logic.
4. Myth #4: The CIO has to deliver end solutions. In an Enterprise Web 2.0 world, the CIO's job is changing. Just as today, they deliver PCs with the MS Office suite of productivity tools, in the future, they will need to deliver a read/write Intranet with a suite of productivity tools that includes things like iUpload, Blogtronix, Atlassian, SocialText, iTensil and Teqlo. The CIO's job will be to focus on delivering core services, such as an operational grid that can be used to deploy new VM stacks, and centralized services, such as Access Control, Authentication, Audit Trail and Back-up

I think you have to hand it to Charlene. She managed to get a huge amount of information in a short space of time for the price of a round of beers.

A partial list of the Enterprise Irregulars who were there included Jeff Nolan, David Terrar, Dennis Howlett, Mark Crofton, Zoli Erdos,Niel Robertson , David Tebbutt,
Charlie Wood,Ismael Ghalimi,Dan Fraber, Ross Mayfield, and very luckily, myself. BTW, I have missed at least half the people who were there.