IT chiefs should use the technologies and guiding principles of enterprise 2.0 to boost productivity and knowledge sharing within their organisation and improve customer engagement outside, according to experts at Gartner's Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit in London.

Gartner analyst Tom Austin argued that widescale enterprise 2.0 - the use of Web 2.0 concepts, especially social software, in the enterprise - is inevitable given the trend towards consumerisation of IT.

But he encouraged technology leaders to move away from constructing rigid pre-ordained systems and instead try to put more responsibility for the running of social software projects into the hands of end users, for example by replacing an intranet with a wiki-style system.

"Enterprise 2.0 depends on freeform environments rather than forcing everything to be pre-ordered. It leverages how people work by mirroring freeform simplicity," he said.

"It is informal, socially-enabled and participative. People are social, informal, messy and intuitive, so you can't engineer what they do."

Austin acknowledged that there must still be guidelines covering what people can and cannot do, but said that to get the most from people they will need to be given flexibility and freedom.

"Pick a few areas to allow patterns to evolve, like folksonomies and wikis," he said. "It is not IT giving up responsibility but pushing some onto the end users, because if you do this they will discover things they never could have otherwise."

Such an approach could not only benefit the organisation from an internal perspective, but could improve customer loyalty and drive sales and marketing initiatives by locating and engaging existing communities externally, Austin explained.

Ian Black, global operations manager at enterprise search firm Autonomy, said that there needs to be a balance between control and freedom if organisations are to benefit from enterprise 2.0 initiatives.

"It is interesting that we are constantly having conversations about how it must be one or the other, but from experience I have seen a mix," he said. "The reality is that we are in chaos and technology should deal with that."

Gartner analyst Carol Rozwell argued that social software can also be used to improve the success of technology implementations by discerning the interrelationships between colleagues, and identifying the key members of an organisation.

"By decomposing the organisational hierarchy you often find that the best connected staff are not the bosses. They are often quite peripheral," she said.