There is an interesting article on ReadWriteWeb about “11 Things Startups Should Know about Enterprise 2.0“.

I will not paraphrase it here but number 11 taps into some of the conversations we have been having about the tensions between the silo nature of the enterprise and the open nature of social media.

As a CIO I would say that the most difficult thing for startups to do is to be able to show that they can solve my problem. I like examples, real world examples, and so you get the chicken and egg situation where sales depend on having a proven solution but getting that proof requires someone to have bought the product/service in the first place.

This is why we need to be smarter around innovation and risk. Too often my world takes an engineering approach where we expect every solution to be a Forth Bridge and we assign process and overheads accordingly. There are times when this is absolutely right but not every problem is the Forth Bridge, agility and innovation require us to be smarter.

We also need to become much better at sharing experience and knowledge amongst ourselves. Things like Digital People are a start as is GovBarCamp but we need to be more radical. Perhaps we need a Government 2.0 Unconference? Hmm…