The gasp was tangible. The flurry of keystrokes audible.

The presentation by Pete Fields from Wachovia finally alleviated the tension at the Enterprise 2.0 conference. Through a soft voice Pete articulated clear business rationale for the deployment of Enterprise 2.0 tools that the audience feverishly absorbed. The lack of a discussion like this at the conference has been the elephant in the room.

While Pete's rationale did not addess the typical quantitative elements that most senior executives like to see, his delivery of the business rationale made us believe that is was in fact possible to convince senior people to test the water.

We need to stop discussing twitter and blogs as things that everyone in an organization needs to use (or do? do you use these things or do them!) because they are cool and because the consumer market is insatiable in its demand. Many of the 2.0 tools out there have no connection to the productivity of labour and we need to recognize this or we'll suffer the CFO sword.

Pete's simple rationale provided some clarity on the focal points for our business discussion. We should use them as a filter in our discussions with colleagues about what it is Enterprise 2.0 is about. We should use them as a filter when building out our product roadmaps. We should use them as a filter when demonstrating use cases to potential customers.