Dan Farber & Larry Dignan used this expression on a recent post on ZDNet which struck a cord with me:

What strikes me as the most important facet of Web 2.0/Enterprise 2.0 is applying collective intelligence–the wisdom of employees, partners and customers–to enterprises.

Web-apps gives your organisation the opportunity to:

• Collect the intelligence from all your stakeholders into a central repository
• Share that intelligence back to the group
• Allow the group to comment on, vote on, re-use etc. this intelligence in new ways to build new intellectual property for your organisation
• Automatically notify members of the group when new intelligence becomes available

In effect all of the users of the web-app becomes additional processors of the information captured in the web-app, making the overall processing of information in your organisation much more effective.