Businesses need some policies and oversight over how wikis, for example, are created, edited and phased out or they could end up with scattered and redundant information.
"The danger is if we don't consolidate these systems, we will have mutually inaccessible walled gardens ... and those tools will die out," Andrew McAfee, an associate professor at the Harvard Business School, said at the Collaborative Technology Conference last week.
McAfee wrote an article published recently in The Sloan Management Review called "Enterprise 2.0", which examines the use of Web 2.0 technologies inside corporations.
He noted that the adoption of blogs, wikis and social software within business applications is in its early days but he sees potential for them to take hold slowly.
"The reason I find enterprise 2.0 fundamentally interesting and novel is because we're building a platform that allows us to build structure over time," McAfee said.
Seely Brown said that ultimately, businesses should combine state-of-the-art Web technologies to engender collaboration among end users with a back-end service-oriented architecture.
He noted that the adoption of blogs, wikis and social software within business applications is in its early days but he sees potential for them to take hold slowly.
