It's been some days now that I came across the KPMG "Enterprise 2.0: Fad or Future" report and I must confess that I am a bit puzzled by its content.

Aside the nice looking look-and-feel of the report, this report displays an amount of superficiality and biased information. And that is dangerous for corporate social computing adopters.

Facts?

Page 5 - actually the real first page of the report - contains a table listing software type, software providers and their corporate adopters. In the blog section, TypePad and MovableType are referenced as two software providers while everyone who has googled the terms ends up on SixApart. In the wiki section, Confluence, a leading wiki platform by Atlassian, is not mentioned.
Also as the market for professional software evolves, the lines between blogs, wikis, social networks tend to fade. Products integrate functionalities from the others: Confluence has a blog engine; Movable Type 4 has a community pack. A new breed of groupware appears: Thoughtfarmer, xWiki, BlueKiwi are among many while stand-alone products can be interfaced.

Page 7. Wikipedia is used as THE example of wiki. 24 months ago this was a relevant one, since then plenty of case studies have emerged. Wikipedia probably is now the worst example to pick as it restricts wikis to a single use, both in terms of software and corporate uses. We can do much more than that with a wiki including regular websites (however easier to maintain) or collaborative intranets. We can develop applications that are more meaningful to organisations.

Page7. Tagging, by using del.icio.us as example, is partly assimilated to social bookmarking. Those are two distinct things. We can tag in various applications today and this is very useful to filter and access information. Social Bookmarking is rather used to create painlessly and on-the-go useful knowledge bases; element which incidentally is not mentioned in the "Knowledge Sharing and Management" section page 10.

Finally the "Challenges to adoption of E2.0 tools", page 13, is nothing but a Flintstone approach of the issue with a flavour of an American post 9/11 trauma. Security, "institutional cultures and norms" (i.e. confidentiality and hierarchy) are the usual arguments of conservatism. It's been ages that IT people spend their days on security and data storage. It is now time to enrich and complement this perspective with a focus on knowledge sharing and information access. It is time to gain a more balanced understanding of needs and requirements. People are not dummies; loads of them have been practising social-computing for years now. They have their own blog(s), they use social bookmarks, they collaborate through wikis, they belong to several social networks ... They perfectly understand this is to be different in organisations because there is a different finality. They are ready. What they expect is that their organisation finally understands the value of social computing and finds out contextual ways to implement them in processes so that they create value.

Understanding how social tools fit and complement existing ecosystems, that is the issue to be addressed. And on that one, it seems that a company like KPMG has still a lot to capture to get the point. "The big consulting firms are circling this stuff at the moment but as I said to someone on IM recently they would need personality transplants. I don't mean that rudely but most of them just don't get this stuff." Euan, it seems like you are right!

What does that mean for social software consultants ? For me two things:

1 - There is space for "Enterprise 2.0" and "Social Computing" consultancies. Reading the above mentioned KPMG report leads us to the conclusion that stake is not high to compete against consulting moguls. And the standard product approach IBM, Microsoft, Intel and their long tail - companies that traditionally partner with consulting moguls to close deals - is to conflict with the real value and signification of social computing. As long as they think as Microsoft instead of Apple, their clients and customers will have issues.

2 - However, those firms are packed with smart brains that learn fast, so that it is important that people who have built, with guts, time and passion, the social computing sphere keep on having the lion share of this finally promising market. A decent way to make sure those people continue to provide relevant services and make a decent living out of it in the coming months, is to aggregate. A network would provide geographical coverage to deliver in various locations, shared marketing and human resources and increased knowledge for more relevance.

A good time to organise; a good mix of benefits to satisfy clients indeed.