Still trying to get your employees to embrace the company wiki and other recent collaboration tools? Sorry, the world has moved on.
Four years since the birth of "Enterprise 2.0", many wikis have been abandoned, as companies find it takes more to enthuse staff to share than just building a platform and expecting them to come.
The term was coined in 2006 to describe enterprise social software - intranet tools that were more flexible and, hence, more suitable for knowledge sharing than the rigid systems that sustain companies' day-to-day operations.
In theory, the wikis, blogs and instant messages were a perfect match for Web 2.0 services mushrooming outside the enterprise.
In practice, many companies assumed all they had to do was implement the technology, convince the boss to blog, send an email around to let everyone know and the rest would follow.
"It's not turning out the way they might have planned," says the research director at consulting firm Ovum, Steve Hodgkinson.
"There's a raft of wikis that have gone stale. Some ended up in just another cluttered environment, some got good reaction but weren't particularly useful, so fizzled out. It was not as easy as companies thought. It's interesting because it exposes people's collaborative tendencies or lack thereof."
Hodgkinson and his colleague, principal analyst Richard Edwards, have been studying enterprise collaboration behaviour and conclude that companies need to rethink their strategies.
They say there is hard work involved in fostering collaboration.
"It's hard to find companies that I would regard as doing collaboration well," Hodgkinson says.
"There's a big difference between Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0. In Web 2.0, any kind of interaction equals goodness, because it's open-ended. In enterprise [environments], we use these tools to achieve particular organisational outcomes. Yes, these technologies can enable new types of behaviours but some are not turning out to be as lasting as we thought."
Companies that have gleaned the most from the technology have managed it actively through training, monitoring user behaviour and constant adjustment.
The innovation manager of Deloitte Australia, Simon Townsend, says it's important to go where users want to go.
Deloitte has 4500 staff in Australia and several internal collaboration tools, among them a wikiblog that did not pay dividends for staff and was abandoned.
"A wiki will work very well for one group, say, in conjunction with a secure e-room, but it may not work for others," Townsend says. "The failing of the wikis is that they are not completely intuitive. Not everyone likes that way of working."
Collaboration tools also need sponsors - people entrusted with advancing their cause.
Miha Kralj is one example.
Working within the office of Microsoft's chief technology officer (CTO), his job is to drive "practice, not just interest".
"Essentially, I'm a tribe leader. If you don't put tribe leaders in place, the community will fall away," he says, adding that the tool needs to be relevant to individual users.
"Writing an article for the wiki is so last year, unless you find intrinsic compensation for it."
Edwards says the time has come for companies to stop locking down computers and observe which social technologies are preferred and engaged by employees.
"We need to focus on the human being part of the equation," he says.
"Every corporate employee is a consumer. We need to remind IT and senior managers [of that] every day because what they enjoy using outside they'll use inside."
Today's collaboration tools need to be intuitive, work in short bursts and have a robust databank that is easy to search, according to the innovation manager of Deloitte, Simon Townsend.
Half of the company's 4500 staff use the microblogging software Yammer (yammer.com).
As with Twitter and Facebook, it works with status posts shared by followers and offers instant gratification for little investment. Employees do not feel intimidated by having to author articles.
"It's pretty social," Townsend says. "It started small then someone posted a business question and it was answered. Suddenly, we had hundreds of sign-ups."
Most importantly, he says, it builds a knowledge database.