I have worked in the cloud for a few years now. For me it all started with wikis. I used wikis for project collaboration and found them really useful at first. Eventually the wiki just ended up being a garage to store files in instead of a place for active collaboration. Obviously this wasn't the prescribed use of the wiki. If storage and remote access of files was the goal then my groups would have been much better off with another solution.

So we hit a wall and I couldn't quite figure out why, and then it clicked. Most of our meetings and efforts were done live, side by side with our teammates. While information, input, and ideas were shared vocally the finished diligence was being stored online in the wiki instead of transferring it between laptops on a flash drive. In a way this was useful and saved some time, but it wasn't by any stretch of the imagination a raving success. It wasn't until our teams expanded to include members from fifty to thousands of miles away that the beauty of the wiki was realized.

As our groups expanded, schedules clashed and it became difficult to sync up with the whole team. Enter the wiki and smoother sailing for our projects. Details of a project's progression now attended the drafts of documents. Being unable to make a call wasn't as disabling as before, it was saved in the wiki. We made revisions on the documents and worked as easily as if we were next to each other.

I'm not sure if being in close proximity to a team nullifies the usefulness of a wiki (right now I don't think so), but with remote teams, or at least a team that can't do everything together on the same schedule, wikis are a beautiful solution to project collaboration hiccups.

Check out this talkby Ross Mayfield at the 2008 Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston. He discusses some really interesting points: people vs. software/services/solutions/products, feature to solution conversion, the evolution of use cases, etc.

I have experienced the concern Ross describes as the translation of tools and features used in the consumer realm to solutions in the enterprise space. There seems to be a stark difference between a tool or feature that is used daily and one that is useful daily. The former does not necessarily promote a result other than the passing of time. The latter, however, creates specific deliverables that increase productivity.

As I see it these tools need to be repurposed for enterprise use which may be easier said than done. Their actual functionality does not need to change drastically, only the end for which they are used. An undertaking of this magnitude will undoubtedly affect a company's culture as it deals with the mindsets and habits of employees. But, the result will be an improvement and the process does not need to be as scary as it might sound. To take a note from Ross's talk, I would advocate creating guidelines for usage of any tool or feature while being careful not to limit its functionality. Thus, what was once merely a tool becomes a solution.