The Wall Street Journal's tech blogger Kara Swisher has it partly right in writing about reports that Web 2.0 is gaining traction in the enterprise.

Swisher was working off a story by Sarah Perez on ReadWriteWeb (happy fifth birthday RRW) that distills the Forrester report and helps define the parameters of Web 2.0 for the enterprise.

According to the RRW story, Web 2.0 in the enterprise will be characterized not by Twitter and Facebook but:

Instead, collaboration and productivity tools based on the concepts of Web 2.0, but designed for the enterprise worker will count as being Enterprise 2.0. In addition, for-pay services, like those from BEA Systems, IBM, Microsoft, Awareness, NewsGator Technologies, and Six Apart will factor in.

But here's the problem. Both Perez and Swisher take it for granted that "the old grumps in the IT departments loom large over what gets in to corporations and what does not."

And that's simply not true. The old grumps have not been able to block social networking tools or the iPhone or anything else that people in the organization have a mind to bring in behind what we still touchingly refer to as the firewall.

Here's an equally quaint press release from IBM touting a new research project based in India to help develop mobile collaboration tools.

IBM has discovered this startling truth:

IBM Research examines in great depth the current trajectories of new technologies in the lab and marketplace, concentrating on trends that could be disruptive or the harbingers of change. In many regions, mobile devices are becoming an increasingly viable alternative to PCs. These devices are capable of delivering more types of data, applications and services through advanced wireless networks. This, coupled with the openness and convergence of Web applications, is making a major impact on the global mobile market.

As usual, IBM is absolutely right in its observations, but eons late to the dance in Internet 2.0 terms. At this point, IBM is telling us that the earth orbits the sun, and not the other way around.

And IBM will never catch up. I've said this before. All IBM will ever do is bolt collaboration tools onto their preexisting application suites--a clunky approach for which absolutely no one will have patience.

What surprises me about Swisher and Perez is that they seem to buy into the idea that enterprise users will wait for the grumpy IT departments. Swisher writes:

Still security and scaling issues remain paramount and startups that have pioneered these apps in the consumer space might lose business to big copycats like IBM and Microsoft.

Puleease! Big copycats like IBM and Microsoft have been pouring out the same old blather about security and scaling while line-of-business chiefs are turning to their young hires and saying, "hey, how much is of those open source wiki things going to run me, and how fast can we set it up?"

When they hear the answer (free, tomorrow), they apply the one lesson they retained from B-school: it's better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission. After all, these folks are paid to produce results, and no one is going to complain about their methods if they do produce (especially when those methods are legal).

IBM is that round-headed kid who doesn't even understand his own dog. It's trying to do the right thing where collaboration is concerned, but no one who wears that awful sweater is ever going to be cool enough (or lightweight enough or enticing enough) to land the little red-haired girl.