Software as a service? Old hat. Yawn. Social software as a service? Hm. Interesting. Calling it the “Web 2.0 payday,” a recent report from McKinsey notes that yes, skeptics will scoff, but they’re convinced that Web 2.0 collaborative technologies represent a great opportunity for companies savvy enough to take advantage of them.

Of course that was back in December of 2010, when McKinsey was predicting that aforesaid payday was “arriving faster than expected,” and identified it as company employees being able to collaborate internally and “extend the organization’s reach to customers, partners and suppliers.”

The more networked companies were, the more successful they would be, McKinsey said in 2010, describing a classic S curve in adoption -- early adopters recognize the value of the technology and do their homework, then everybody else notices it and say to themselves “Hey, I gotta get me some of that.”

In addition to YouTube, Facebook and -- unmentioned in the 2010 McKinsey report -- Twitter (News - Alert), Tinniam V. Ganesh, of IBM India, has recently noted the incredible business value to be had in correctly deploying wikis, podcasts, communities, with the whole emphasis being to foster collaboration, fuse and diffuse ideas and spark creative cooperation.

It doesn’t take much imagination to add mobility here as well, of course, as both a major contributor to and beneficiary of the increased collaboration possible with Web 2.0, and to note the contributions of hardware as much as software. Yes, tablets and smartphones, but let’s not forget genuinely easy-to-travel laptops as the MacBook Air.

Ganesh mentions Professor Clay Shirky of New York University, who recycles the old idea of “institutional knowledge” residing in the skulls of employees but untapped by the organization, as “cognitive surplus,” contending that maybe it’s the new generation of social software tools that can unlock a good bit of that for the company’s benefit.

The bottom line, as Ganesh hints at, is letting every employee know what every other employee working on related projects is thinking and doing, and being able to cross-pollinate, or at least benefit from each other’s work. Of course immediately you can see there are issues other than simply technological ones there, probably for the full value of Web 2.0 to take hold organizations have to reconfigure their incentive and compensation approaches.

Because while it’s great that information can be shared so instantly and widely, in most organizations knowledge is still power, and employees will -- naturally -- still guard what they see as information that will benefit themselves, their advancement in the company and their careers, no matter how many opportunities and avenues they have to share it with for someone else who might get the credit.