In a recent post, ZDNet blogger Dennis Howlett asserts that Enterprise 2.0 is a “crock.” It’s a smart and thought-provoking post, which has elicited equally smart and thought-provoking replies from Andrew McAfee, Thomas Vander Wal, Larry Hawes, Gil Yehuda, and others.

I think Dennis’s argument is wrong. But it’s interestingly wrong, which is a very good thing. (There’s a special place in heaven for interestingly wrong arguments.) Rather than tackle the’ entire argument, I’ll focus on my favorite part. Dennis writes:

Like it or not, large enterprises – the big name brands – have to work in structures and hierarchies that most E2.0 mavens ridicule but can’t come up with alternatives that make any sort of corporate sense. Therein lies the Big Lie. Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all.

The problem with this provocative sentiment is that Dennis doesn’t understand the difference between transparency and anarchy.

He’s not alone. Dennis has picked up on the unfortunate fact that a lot of Enterprise 2.0 rhetoric has a man-the-barricades, throw-the-bums out flavor. That’s particular true on Twitter, the blogosphere, and industry conferences, where the most outspoken advocates–Dennis’s E2.0 mavens–dominate the conversation. If you listen closely, you can hear La Marseillaise (or is it just Les Miserables?) playing on the hotel muzak.

But when you look at real Enterprise 2.0 implementations in real companies, a different story emerges.

Companies are not using blogs, wikis, social networking, or micromessaging to upend hierarchies. They’re not trying to introduce anarchy to corporate America. They’re not fighting a moral crusade to free the downtrodden knowledge worker from the tyranny of the org chart. But they are using these tools, and using them to good effect.

Successful Enterprise 2.0 practitioners have learned that it’s a mistake to radically realign accountability within their organizations. They respect, preserve, and even reinforce the roles and responsibilities already prevalent within the organization. If your job used to be to manage Tech Support in your company, then guess what your job is after your company adopts Enterprise 2.0? You guessed it: managing Tech Support. That responsibility is still on your shoulders, just as it was in the old days.

The difference is that Enterprise 2.0 gives you and your team information and relationships that help you accomplish the things for which you are and remain responsible. You can see who is working on what, even when you’re on different continents. You can access relevant information from other departments. You can quickly put your fingers on documents otherwise lost in the bowels of your email in-box. You can see and discuss in public the issues that your colleagues are already grumbling about in the company washroom. These are good things, and companies are adopting them because they’re good business.

When Dennis says that “Enterprise 2.0 pre-supposes that you can upend hierarchies for the benefit of all”, he is confusing transparency with anarchy. Put differently, he’s confusing information access with decision rights. (For more on the difference, see McAfee’s The Great Decoupling and Ross Mayfield’s Decoupling Decision Rights and Decentralization. Andy and I also talked about it a couple years ago in a memorable panel discussion at Razorfish.)

Enterprise 2.0 pools information, so that workers can benefit from enhanced access to their colleagues and their colleagues’ work. That’s transparency. But Enterprise 2.0 does not pool decision rights. Embracing Enterprise 2.0 does not mean that workers can assume decision rights that formerly belonged to others. That would be anarchy.

But fear not, oh champions of freedom and enlightenment, all is not lost! Enterprise 2.0 can still free you from the chains that oppress you!

“Hierarchy” is a pejorative term, often used to suggest that senior decision-makers are ignorant, out-of-touch, or otherwise unqualified for the responsibilities the organization accords them. The more transparent an organization is, the less likely that problem is to occur. Open, ongoing conversations with staff, customers, and channel partners make management better-informed, less isolated, and more engaged with what’s really happening in the organization and the marketplace. It’s easier to focus on what really matters, and harder for managers to succumb to yes-men and wishful thinking. And it’s easier for staff to understand management decisions, even when those decisions are controversial or unpopular.

When decisions get made in a transparent organization, we don’t call it Hierarchy. We call it Leadership.

My grandfather never used computers, and he died when “wiki” was still just a word in Hawaiian. But in a single comment he taught me all about Enterprise 2.0.

Grandaddy (known to the rest of the world as Phil Plesofsky) was a mild-mannered, old-school stock broker with a boutique brokerage firm in Chicago. He wore pin-stripe suits so conservative that once he accidentally bought the same suit twice. His television idol was Fish, Abe Vigoda’s character on Barney Miller. When the office eventually installed computer terminals on all the brokers’ desks, Grandaddy tolerated his grudgingly, as if it were an uninvited relative who refused to leave but couldn’t be thrown out.

The firm, Freehling & Company, occupied one floor of a pre-war high-rise in the Loop. It was laid out as a single, open room with two long rows of desks where the brokers sat. A big board at the front of the room rolled stock prices as a tickertape noisily clacked out updates from the business news wire. Brokers submitted trades by sealing slips of paper in plastic cannisters, which were sucked through pneumatic tubes to the main office. (Photo courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/molly/3077775845/).

One of the rituals of my childhood was visiting the Freehling office. Grandaddy would walk my brother and me down the brokerage floor, stopping at each desk to meet Irv, Norm, Jake, Stanley, and the other brokers (all men). They shook our hands, praised our grandfather, and told us how much we had grown since the last visit.

In the mid-80s, Freehling was acquired by a New York investment bank, who moved the offices to a brand new granite-and-steel high-rise on Lasalle. There was modern furniture and original art on the walls.

For the first time, the senior brokers had private offices.

When I visited the new office–a teenager by this time–I was impressed by the new offices. I complemented my grandfather on the big step up.

“To tell you the truth, I hate it,” he replied.

“Why?” I asked in disbelief.

“In the old place, when a broker got a tip about an upcoming earnings announcement or a CEO departure, we all knew about it instantly. You could actually watch the information roll across the floor like a wave, going from one desk to the next, to the next until everyone in the office was talking about it. Now we sit in our private offices, we close our doors, and nobody has the slightest idea what’s going on.”

That remains the best description of Enterprise 1.0 I have ever heard–which is why I still remember the comment over 20 years later.

Many of us today sit in the digital equivalent of Grandaddy’s shiny, new, and very private office. We have powerful computers with big shiny screens and powerful tools for managing documents and sending messages. We have BlackBerries and iPhones. And in one respect, we’re more connected than ever before.

But there’s something missing. It’s all private. Sure we can email each other. Occasionally we even take the bold step of picking up a phone. But there’s no ambient awareness. There’s no serendipitous discovery of what a colleague is doing. There’s no wave of information that rolls instantly down the shop floor.

Enterprise 2.0 is all about leaving the private office and returning to that big, open space with the wave of information rolling from one desk to the next to the next)

Most CIOs I talk to want to spend more time on strategy–not platform strategy or application strategy, but business strategy. The fun part of their job isn’t about keeping the lights on or the servers cooled. It’s about using technology to fundamentally improve the way their companies do business.

Strategic relevance can be a sore spot for CIOs. Although most line managers agree in principle that IT is strategically important, CIOs still struggle for a seat at the strategy table. Senior leaders in manufacturing and other operationally intensive industries understand the importance of IT. But in other sectors, line management has a hard time seeing IT as more than a back-office support function. That’s particularly true in professional services, pharma, media, and other knowledge-intensive industries which traditionally create value through individual talent rather than operations.

Enterprise 2.0 is changing all that.

Managers outside traditional IT strongholds are realizing that wikis, blogs, social networking, micromessaging, and other forms of online collaboration are dramatically changing the way people interact with each other. Most of the early Enterprise 2.0 implementations were driven by non-IT experimentation. Use of Enterprise 2.0 tools has been heaviest in precisely those knowledge-intensive industries that traditionally discount the strategic value of IT.

As Enterprise 2.0 matures, we are entering a strategic phase. Companies are moving beyond their early, ad-hoc, unmanaged experiments, and trying to figure out how it all fits together–not just for an individual department or project, but for the company and its customers. As one client told me last week, “We’ve done more to advance the company’s strategy today than I have in the past year.”

If you’re a CIO, your company is looking to you to show the way. How will Enterprise 2.0 change the way you do business? What benefits can your company realize? How will this change the way you collaborate internally? How will it change your interactions with customers?

This is a golden opportunity to move out of the back office and drive your company’s business strategy. Are you ready?