It’s good to see the CIPD warning HR about the perils of ignoring Web 2.0 tools for knowledge sharing and collaboration. After all, the reality is that HR needs Web 2.0 far more than Web 2.0 needs HR.

Social networks, blogs, wikis and other Web 2.0 tools may be relatively new to the HR community, but debate has been raging for years about how to turn them from consumer devices into useful business tools. I remember attending the inaugural Office 2.0 conference in Silicon Valley back in autumn 2006, where experts suggested recruitment could be the ‘killer application’ for Web 2.0 (geek speak for indispensable software). The argument was that growing numbers of people use the web for recruitment already, so it would lend itself nicely to new ways of working.

Admittedly most of the people attending that first Office 2.0 conference were in the business of selling software and services rather than actually using them, but by the time the second event came round the following year some real-life case studies had emerged. And what was eye-catching about them was that they tended to be driven from the ground up. Instead of the IT or HR department encouraging adoption it was often younger employees who led the way, driven by sheer frustration at how hard it was to share information and collaborate in a corporate or public sector environment.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer was a good example. One employee talked about how he’d circulated notes about a conference he’d attended and found they generated a huge volume of internal emails. That prompted him and a colleague to set up an internal blog, which by autumn 2007 was getting 400,000 hits and was being funded by the company. At the same event, Morgan Stanley revealed it was running 70-80 Web 2.0 projects, many of them driven by a 20-something in-house pioneer.

The reality is that blogs, social networks such as MySpace and video-publishing sites such as YouTube have long been a way of life among “Generation Y” and are spreading across all age groups. It’s all about user-generated content and sharing, the opposite of the one-way ‘push’ approach and formal meetings that characterise traditional corporate communications. Frankly, if you’re used to tracking what your friends are doing through Twitter and sharing photos and updates through Facebook, you’re not going to be massively impressed if your HR department takes three months to set up a cross-functional steering committee to investigate internal communications policy.

The problem for HR is that Web 2.0 tools will continue to be used by employees, whether through officially sanctioned channels or not. If HR chooses not to participate it will simply be bypassed – to its own cost, and to the detriment of the rest of the organisation. On the other hand, the potential benefits of using some of these tools are huge, from improving internal communications and collaboration to expanding recruitment channels and building alumni networks. Sure, there are big issues to tackle along the way. But those challenges will be confronted with or without HR’s involvement – and HR should be helping to shape the solutions.