First off, you nail what has been my experience in working with enterprises looking to integrate social media/community building into online strategy. On the one hand, the driver of social media adoption is not generally IT. It's Marketing, in the case of external customer/constituency facing communities, and Communications, in the case of internal employee-centered community initiatives. On the other, IT does have a rightful say in vetting whether a vendor scales, integrates, is secure and the like, so the paradox is at what point do you bring IT into the equation? Case in point, my company, Snapp Networks (www.snappville.com), provides a solution applicable to both internal and external community builders. The use cases, functional requirements and supporting workflows are relatively baked at this point (in terms of customer needs), but experience to date has been that 25% of the selling time is spent winning the buyer (marketing/comms) and 75% is spent navigating the IT waters. Clearly, that is no - Mark Sigal from FriendFeed MT Plugin