Blogging Andy McAfee's keynote from the Enterprise 2.0 conference, Joseph Thornley notes that McAfee pushes back on the question of the ROI of Enterprise 2.0:

McAfee cautions against attempting to justify the adoption of the tools solely in terms of ROI. Early estimates are likely to be contentious. He instead suggests that the focus should be on telling the story of what they do.

(my emphasis) I think this is a key point, and it connects with one of the key capabilities of Enterprise 2.0 software as well - the ability it gives individuals in the organization to "tell the story" of what they are doing. I don't just mean via blogging or wiki entries, but rather the fact that all the key technologies of Enterprise 2.0 (as of Web 2.0) enable people to express more fully what they are doing, just by doing it! Their tagging, their social networks, their social bookmarking - all these ways of being present and connecting express individuals and their work in a way that makes them more available and productive in the organization.

As I've stressed in past posts, this is not really about collaboration. In fact, I wouldn't mind if that word passed from the vocabulary, or at least from wide use. In daily life, we are all interacting in ways that are useful, productive, generative all the time, not just when we are in explicit collaborative groups or working together on projects. These facts of sociality are much more significant than mere collaboration, I mean to say, and the more we enable them in software and other technologies (viz. mobility, media and more), the quicker and more surely we'll continue to step forward in the process of changing business - and changing everything business can change.