The geek factor?

Perhaps all these technologies are only accessible to the enthusiasts, the geeks, suggested the panel moderator, Andrew McAfee, associate professor of business administration, Harvard Business School. "XML is not a technology for the masses," he said.

But in a sense it is, countered Willis. "Technologies like XBRL are embedded in something else, like [an] Excel [spreadsheet]," he said. "The financial analysts are just using Excel."

Mickool said that embedded quality poses a special challenge for the enterprise. "We need to employ these technologies because our users are buying devices and software that already have them, and they expect to be able to operate on our infrastructure," he said.

Look good naked

McKook said that organizations need to realize that what McAfee describes is introducing a new kind of transparency to organizations and is becoming an attribute of the Web. "We need and want this kind of feedback," he said.

Willis shared a favorite quote related to McAfee's point, from author Don Tapscott and David Ticol in their book The Naked Corporation: How the Age of Transparency will Revolutionize Business. "If you're going to be naked, you better be buff," Willis said. The Web introduces transparency into the processes of creating, sharing and interpreting information. The days of a special class of experts controlling a one-way flow of information are over, he suggested.

Forbes' Lin argued that experts, such as editors, are still needed. "But their role is different," he said. He outlined a role that is more collaborative, more communal and more iterative. The Forbes Website has tools for allowing self-proclaimed experts to rate and comment on stocks. But other tools track the stock's performance over time, and rate the effectiveness of the stock pickers, and Forbes editor participate in all of these. "Experts need to operate at a higher level," Lin said.

McAfee noted that such changes were blurring the boundaries within enterprises, and between enterprises and groups such as customers and suppliers or regulators. "Don't we want or need these boundaries?" he asked.

BT's Pardee said this weakening of boundaries in BT's case paradoxically means that customers put greater trust in, and demand higher performance from, the telecom giant to provide reliable and secure networks. And it creates new business opportunities. "Access [to the network] is becoming a commodity for BT," she said. "The innovation and value we add lie in the software layers on top of that."

"Most organizations don't know where their boundaries are," added Willis. If you receive some set of data, do you know where it came from, what product it's associated with, how current it is, whether or to what degree it's accurate? Web 2.0 standards and technologies can address these issues even as traditional boundaries shift, he suggested.

Questioners pointed to problems still to be addressed, ranging from wikis that develop feudal or gang mentalities that actually stifle communication and sharing, to maintaining data quality and service level standards in fluid SOA environments that rely on third-party or external software components.

"It's not easy to implement Web 2.0," cautioned Forbes' Lin. "It's not a panacea for business problems."