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Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 Study from AIIM

by Bill Ives

August 9, 2009 at 3:17 am · Filed under FASTforward'09

AIIM has recently published a study on Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0. It provides more encouraging news for enterprise 2.0. It finds that business take up of enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the last year. This supports the study from Toby Ward I recently posted on (see New Study Finds Social Media Becoming Mainstream on Corporate Intranet). According to this AIIM report, there has been a significant increase in the understanding of how Web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, blogs, forums, and social networks can be used to improve business collaboration and knowledge sharing.

The survey was taken by 789 AIIM members between May 11and May 26, 2009. Over half of organizations studied are now considering enterprise 2.0 to be “important” or “very important” to their business goals and success. Only 17% admitted that they have no idea what it is, compared to 40% at the start of 2008. However, only 25% of organizations are actually doing anything about it – but that is up from 12% in the previous survey. The numbers are lower than the Toby Ward study but the trend is the same.

This study found that Knowledge-sharing, collaboration and responsiveness are considered the biggest drivers. Lack of understanding, corporate culture and cost are the biggest impediments. IT departments are by far the strongest users, with 68% using Enterprise 2.0. In contrast, only 6% of organizations are using it throughout the business. This is interesting as the Toby Ward study that IT was one of the biggest obstacles. It might reflect a different audience mix with the organization in the two studies.

I was interested to find that 71% agree that it’s easier to locate “knowledge” on the Web than it is to find it on internal systems. This is actually a big improvement over what I found in the past few years. Taking a cue from Andrew McAfee I would ask every audience that I presented to on enterprise 2.0 this question. Would all those who find it easier to find information on their corporate intranet than the Web raise their hand. No one every did this for me and Andy reported the same results at the time.

More work needs to be done in the governance area as only 30% of companies have policies on blogs, forums and social networks, compared to 88% who have policies for email. I think that such policies are useful. On the other hand, the study found that while almost all companies would not dream of sending out un-approved press releases or web pages, less than 1 in 5 have any sign-off procedures for blogs and forums. I think these sign-off policies are counter-productive and good general policy guidelines reduce the need for any sign-offs.

There is much more including a lot of detail on personal use of social media by the participants. I recommend looking at the complete study. It adds to the growing body of research supporting the emergence of enterprise 2.0, at least in terms of tool adoption.

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VMNplusAugust 10th, 2009 at 11:03 am

Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0 Study from AIIM:
AIIM has recently published a study on Collaboration and Ente.. http://bit.ly/16OsAI