Does every organization need a Web 2.0 strategy?

I read with interest this morning Gartner’s new 2006 Emerging Technologies Hype Cycle which they released earlier today.  Of course, I wasn’t too terribly surprised to find that Web 2.0 figured prominently at the top of the list.  Released yearly, the list identifies and analyzes the most hyped new technology trends.  I find the Hype Cycle to be both good reading as well as a useful reality check.  The report does make one thing clear; Web 2.0 will have significant business impact in the next half-decade and companies everywhere are having to consider directly how it affects them and their business strategies.
Of the four aspects of Web 2.0 that Gartner mentions, three of them –  including Social Network Analysis, Ajax, and Collective Intelligence — are rated as either transformational or having a high potential business impact.  In fact, Gartner’s analysis of one of the most important elements of Web 2.0 (some would say it’s the core), collective intelligence, is identified as probably the most transformational — if long-term –  trend to watch:

Collective intelligence, rated as transformational (definition: enables new ways of doing business across industries that will result in major shifts in industry dynamics) is expected to reach mainstream adoption in five to ten years. Collective intelligence is an approach to producing intellectual content (such as code, documents, indexing and decisions) that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority. This is seen as a more cost-efficient way of producing content, metadata, software and certain services.

But five to ten years before it becomes mainstream?  I’m reminded of my colleague Coach Wei’s recent admonition that "every organization should have a Web 2.0 story."  To answer the eponymous title of this post: Yes, the clock is ticking folks and long lead times like this, particularly in the IT industry, have been known to induce complacency.