The success of Web 2.0 consumer web sites teaches us many lessons about how we can improve internal IT and business to consumer online applications. Social technologies have made it progressively easier and easier for people to find each other, share information and collaborate, and we have seen how a singular focus on supporting individual needs can crete powerful network effects when aggregated at scale.

However, these and other lessons have not yet penetrated the world of corporate IT in most companies today, which means expensive, centralised and highly bureaucratic models of co-ordination and collaboration are the norm.

The recession is a perfect time to change this, and to seek leaner, flatter business processes and structures that act as enablers rather than dampeners of innovation and initiative. We simply cannot afford the high-cost models of internal co-ordination that have persisted for so long.

The key to this change is recognising that, in most cases, people power is the best way to get things done, and the role of technology is to augment human cognition and decision making, rather than try to replicate or replace it. People over process. This is why so many employees in companies have reached out to find each other using consumer online social networks such as Facebook and LinkedIn in preference to their own internal systems, which do not provide easy ways to network with colleagues to get the job done. Similarly, we have seen people go outside the firewall to initiate wikis for collaboration, or blogs for sense making, or perhaps consumer RSS management tools for information management. Each of these capabilities should be available within a modern corporate IT setting.

We can now take advantage of a range of enterprise-ready social tools, including blogs, wikis, social networking tools, information management tools and so on, and these are generally a great deal cheaper and more effective than older generations of internal IT systems. As people have become accustomed to the simple user experience of Google’s tools or Facebook in their non-work lives, they are increasingly asking why the experience of internal IT in their companies must be so poor, so frustrating and such a time sink. The fact is, it doesn’t need to be that way. It can be smarter, simpler and more delightful to use, and the transition to lightweight social tools can achieve much of what internal IT has promised, but so far failed to deliver.

Lee Bryant is the Director of headshift www.headshift.com

To find out more about the next Enterprise Social Media event taking place on 15th March 2010 at Olympia, London, visit http://www.enterprisesocialmedia.net/