The report packs a lot of food for thought into a small space. Much of the data will be head-nodding material for readers of this blog, but in several areas there are items that jump out. First, though, a quick overview.

This survey focuses on what Web 2.0 technologies are being adopted, on which areas of business they are deployed, on techniques to support adoption, and on the executives’ level of satisfaction with the results. Helpfully, the report provides consistent comparisons to McKinsey’s last report on this topic, the April, 2007 How Businesses are Using Web 2.0. The report is also helpful once again in identifying differences in E20 patterns among regions (e.g. executives in India and Asia-Pac are more than twice as likely as Europeans to cite blogs as a tool of real importance to their companies).

The McKinsey authors focus their commentary on several core messages.

1) There are more executives now reporting dissatisfaction with their E20 investments and programs (although Asia-Pac bucks the trend).

2) There is an emerging gap between some 20% of firms who are satisfied with their experiences, using the tools widely, and achieving positive results, and another 20% of firms going in the other direction – dissatisfied and reducing their use of the tools.

3) While internal uses of E20 like managing knowledge and promoting collaboration are marginally more common, externally-facing uses like improving customer service, acquiring customers, and integrating more effectively with suppliers and partners are almost equally popular.

4) Among the tools themselves, there is an increasing array of choices and some changes already in the popularity of individual tools. Wikis, for example, are much more popular than they were a year ago, while peer-to-peer networks have dropped by 50% or more.

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Turning to the items that jump out I’ll focus on the tools area. One major datapoint is the ascendancy of social networking to the top of the E20 tool list, roughly at the same level of importance as blogs in most regions. (While McKinsey includes “Web Services” as an E20 tool, and it is by far the most important to the surveyed executives, I’m ignoring it here as an apple among oranges.) I suspect that this sudden jump in importance for enterprise social networking is more anticipation than reality, more Facebook fallout than widespread internal deployment. But it’s a first great example of how the public web experience is driving expectations for the enterprise.

The next datapoint of note is the sudden appearance of video sharing as a Web 2.0 tool already surpassing podcasts and closing in on wikis in level of importance. This is clearly a second great example of how public web experiences, in this case YouTube, drive practice in the enterprise.

Another surprise is the low level of importance the executives assigned to rating as a tool. In this case, a technique widely used on many different kinds of public web sites (from Amazon to TripAdvisor to eBay) appears to be falling below the radar for the enterprise.

In one of the bigger “ouches” for fans of socially-generated knowledge, tagging appears to be another casualty in the McKinsey research. Tagging rates even lower than rating in the tool catalog. It would appear from this data that anything that asks the user to thoughtfully execute one more click, or type one more word in an adjacent box is not acceptable in the view of this executive audience. Or perhaps a larger issue is that both rating and tagging require some degree of strategy and an ongoing “harvesting” program in order to capitalize on their enterprise value. The executives’ lack of enthusiasm may be a reflection of their understanding that they are not invested in providing that kind of strategy and oversight at this time.

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We’ve known all along that relatively small numbers of people are interested in tagging, but one of the best things about this tool is that even a small percentage of a knowledge workforce can produce major added value to a content collections of all kinds. You’d think that the easy knowledge ROI offered by tagging should get any exec’s attention.

Overall, the McKinsey survey provides another proof point that use of the E20 technologies is increasing. That it also shows lumpy adoption experience and shifts in tool use is something we should expect from an emerging set of practices. The fact that the data establish that the successful firms are increasingly successful and have been building up a set of best practices for adoption represents a real transformation over the past 12 months.

As part of Microsoft, FAST is now working with the SharePoint team to help enable the growing base of 85 million Microsoft Office SharePoint Server licensees to integrate advanced search and discovery capabilities into their collaborative environments, including, of course, the SharePoint E20 applications.

It’s been around 45 days since Microsoft completed the acquisition of FAST, and now we are publishing tools to deliver interoperability between FAST ESP and Microsoft SharePoint Server in an open process. Today we posted a set of open downloadable FAST search Web Parts on CodePlex, Microsoft’s open source project hosting site for the developer community. See more about the details at the Microsoft Enterprise Search Blog or check out the SharePoint Team Blog.

These Web Parts are available as a free download and provide discrete pluggable services for such functions as including an advanced FAST ESP search box in any SharePoint project and for creating conversational results displays that allow SharePoint users to refine searches through navigating dynamic clusters of content. SharePoint administrators will be able to build FAST ESP-based search sites inside SharePoint Server 2007 by simply dropping in and configuring the appropriate components.

The Web Parts and Site Template are available as a free download from CodePlex at www.codeplex.com/espwebparts and are part of the Search Community Toolkit.

Look for the features, functionality and range of FAST ESP Web Parts to grow through contributions from the search developer community as well as further contributions from the Microsoft Enterprise Search Group.

The net of this is that the FAST team moves intact into a much-expanded Microsoft Enterprise Search Group (MESG, for those collecting new acronyms). We are particularly excited about the charter for this new group, which is to invest to be the industry leader developing the most innovative technologies for the widest range of customers and greatly expanding what has traditionally been viewed as the “search space.”

This direction is one that long-time analysts of the search space (myself included) have pointed to as the most likely development as search becomes more and more central to all of our online activities. We are still just at the beginning of the changes we see coming, which we see accelerating on the foundation of three core elements of the Microsoft search vision:

Search will be everywhere.
Search will enable unique user experiences.
Search will change the way people do business.

I wanted to share with FASTforward Blog readers what Kirk Koenigsbauer, Microsoft Sharepoint General Manager and the business executive behind the acquisition had to say today on Microsoft’s Enterprise Search blog. Kirk’s post:

FAST Tender Offer Complete!

Well, it has been a while since I last posted – but for good reason. Aside from our usual day-to-day efforts to deliver great enterprise search solutions for our customers, we’ve also been feverishly working on the acquisition of FAST Search & Transfer that we originally announced on January 8. Today, I’m excited to share that the tender offer is complete!

As I mentioned in January, FAST has an incredibly talented team of folks who bring great customer focus and tremendous expertise in the category – more than 60% of their people are engineers and close to 50 of them have PhDs in relevant fields. One of their true visionaries, John Markus Lervik, who has been FAST CEO, will transition to become Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President of Enterprise Search. John’s leadership will have an immediate impact on the development across our comprehensive portfolio of enterprise search offerings – including Microsoft Search Server 2008 Express , search for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and FAST ESP – and will result in the future delivery of a single enterprise search platform. I’m thrilled to welcome our new team members on board and am eager for them to get started!

By bringing together our two companies, customers will no longer have to compromise when evaluating the enterprise search solution that’s best for them. We can now meet all their needs no matter how basic or complex: Search Server Express available as a free download; SharePoint offers search integrated with other business productivity tools; and for those with highly sophisticated needs, FAST ESP provides best-in-class capabilities for the most demanding search applications in both internal and customer-facing scenarios. And, you can be assured that with our expanded team in place, we’ll be in an even better position to continue innovation across all three products, including FAST ESP on Linux and UNIX.

Speaking of Linux and UNIX, some people may be (mis)interpreting our continued support and investment in these platforms as a broader change for Microsoft – so here’s some color. We’re making a pragmatic decision to continue to delight a core part of FAST’s customer base that has chosen the Linux/UNIX OS. You can bet that we’ll innovate on Windows, too, and over time we hope customers will see .NET as a preferred platform choice.

Net, our approach doesn’t imply any kind of broader change for our company in its strategy (so conspiracy theorists can stand down ) and you shouldn’t expect to see SharePoint running on UNIX. We’re making a business decision for enterprise search and feel great about what it means for our FAST search customers.

Getting to this point has been quite a journey, but the most exciting part about it for me is that we are only just getting started. Whether it’s ensuring customers continue to get great service from the people and support teams they know or building on the span of our product portfolio, I’m confident that the combination of Microsoft and FAST will serve customers’ needs more broadly and help make enterprise search become a truly ubiquitous tool that is central to how workers find and use information.

I look forward to sharing more with you as the journey continues.

Kirk Koenigsbauer
General Manager,
SharePoint Business Group

What’s striking about this projection is how far we have come in a few short years. (NB: notice that Gartner has dropped its famous “probability qualifier” that formerly announced that they were only, say, .7 committed to their announced projection.) So at 1.0 assurance, Chris quotes Whit as stating: “End-users of information access technology do not recognize, respect and treat as reasonable the divisions that application architecture have forced on information access strategy.”

A few short years ago, end-users had no choice but to treat those divisions as dictated on tablets from IT on high. There was no practical way for information access strategy to span those silos. The 2.0 experience has played a pivotal role in flipping our perspective. The new Web has been raising expectations and driving an unflattering comparative experience with enterprise software. As a direct response, 2.0 technologies are flowering all over the enterprise spectrum, as we have documented thoroughly here on the FASTforward Blog. (And Gartner themselves have added an interesting research practice around the apt label Consumerization of IT.)

But expectations don’t rise so far and so fast without some practical underpinnings. What brings together the unprecedented breadth of capability in what Whit Andrews is talking about with, for example, the kind of Enterprise 2.0 technology profile that Andrew McAfee outlined in the SLATES model (Search, Links, Authorship, Tags, Extensions, Signals) is the fact that (except for “authorship”) search now can provide core technology in all the 2.0 areas and across all the divisions of enterprise data.

A major reason that Whit can confidently assert that 90% of data will soon be analyzed and made discoverable by search technology is simply that advanced search has become much more capable of understanding and mingling structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data at scale. The innovations in flexible data models and high performance processing architectures that are coming onto the market have provided for the first time a reasonable platform for the kind of boundaryless information access strategy that Whit sees rolling across the enterprise landscape over the next four years.

At the same time, again in the 2.0 mode, we are putting much more innovation today into suggestive algorithmic techniques that focus on the user. The next horizons in search lie in recognizing that user intent, whether inside the enterprise or out on the commercial or entertainment web, ultimately drives the quality of the search and the success of the user experience. The key perception is that people don’t search for no reason. And they don’t necessarily want to see what they wanted to see yesterday. As the little diagram suggests, they want to connect with answers and other people and data and services that are important to their current intentions.

So by 2012, look for a picture in search that’s not only accessing orders of magnitude more data, but doing so in a way that allows users to organize that world of information and to help it make sense for them.

First, I should acknowledge the compliment Tom extended us at FAST in stating: “…it’s to the conference creators’ credit that it stretched its community of discourse to include both.” (Clare and David’s perspectives, that is.) But it was actually a simple decision, as their perspectives represent what we view as adjacent planes in a larger conversation about uncovering meaning in an online world where answers hide in plain sight.

One big reason it made sense to slot Clare and David together is that they have what amounts to very similar backgrounds in confronting some of the largest and most challenging problems in online information access and provisioning. They didn’t just arrive on the FASTforward08 big stage with a bunch of fresh and innovative ideas; for each of them, the ideas have been developing over careers that have spanned a couple of decades. In David’s case, it included time at Open Text and some serious familiarity with the pioneer legacy of Tim Bray’s search index of the Oxford English Dictionary and the mid-‘90’s Open Text Index of the Web, at one point among the largest of Web search engines. In Clare’s case, it included grappling with the issues of aggregating news and professionally published journals – thousands of sources and hundreds of thousands of incremental items daily – from the early days of dial-in Dow Jones News Retrieval to today’s almost unrecognizably improved Factiva experience (the dashboard that she shared with the gathering in Orlando).

So adjacency is the strong concept, uncovering meaning is the practice. I would propose to Tom that it is not so much about there being two opposites here as about evidence of complementary practices where the user is concerned. We might think of adjacent opposites in the sense of two sides of a coin. “Heads” and “tails” can serve as powerful differentiators, if we want to decide quickly between two options. But if we want to get the benefit of the coin’s “practice” as money, we have to use the whole coin.

For David, the core idea of his powerfully evoked image of “the new front page” is that we have shifted the control of the structure of our information engagement from the owners of the content to ourselves as the community of users of the content.

But most of the time, we are not interacting with information just for its own sake – we don’t search because we decided to come into work in the morning and spend 45’ searching – we are interacting with information because we want to accomplish something. And there’s great news! As David says, we now can use metadata as a lever to pry what we need out of the amazing sea of data and content out there. And in the Factiva work toward provisioning role-based interfaces that aggregate news and journal content and blogs and videos for a number of common professions in business, Clare is taking a lead in shaping the generic use of metadata into a practice that allows the users’ context to construct at least algorithmically emergent “dashboard” environments. And these can leverage that web messiness to help people get very specific things accomplished quickly. Is this an objectionable overlay of structure? Ask the people who wouldn’t or couldn’t work without their Bloomberg machines.

To leverage the user revolution, we need both Clare’s and David’s perspectives to engage in the next-gen practice of sense making in a “read-write” world. We need to promote the “messiness” of the web’s contributed and participatory metadata while at the same time we need search and provisioning tools that keep us from being buried in the very mess that creates the additional value. In the conversation between these two “corners,” as Tom calls them, we are just now starting to see where the search patterns will emerge to drive the web experiences we will choose — as people and as professionals.

Focusing on the business challenges facing managers of media and entertainment websites, the paper, Enhancing Content Discovery Through Recommendations Solutions, includes insights on how innovators can:

• Grow content and advertising revenues by exposing new or unknown content. Current search structures guide users to content within a particular topic area or category. By building associations across categories, recommendations expose users to what they may have otherwise bypassed
• Encourage browsing by teasing users with additional content choices, and spotlight popular content to drive wider distribution
• Obtain customer intelligence on which content items are most valued. Feedback loops analyze what content is preferred and not preferred in near real time by blending active feedback and customer behavior statistics
• Connect users with communities and experts who share their interests. The social context provides a rich source of insight on connecting people both with content and other people who share their interests or questions.

Register here to download this free paper from FAST today — and let us know who you would like to recommend it to!

Recently he commented:

“…when I see emergent tools with the following characteristics, I get very interested:

• Low barriers to entry, in investment costs, running costs and prerequisite skills
• Low TCO, open architecture, no proprietary lock-ins, either overt or covert
• Evidence of take-up by Generation M
• Emergence of a community of participation in an open multisided marketplace around the product or service
• The *possibility* that knowledge work can become more effective and more efficient, not just in the enterprise, but in health, education and welfare. Globally.”

These are the dynamics JP is seeing in the Facebook phenomenon, in Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and other web watering holes where user-generated content is the wellspring of value. He has noted that the enterprise is starting to benefit as well, citing examples like fire departments (Los Angeles FD) using Twitter and “old line” manufacturers like Slater Tools and aerospace manufacturing specialist Winslow Automatics taking advantage of YouTube.

Many IT departments are plagued by “polarizing” debates – with social media tools bleeding into the enterprise from the bottom up, with the “consumerization” of technology, and with the emergence of customer-centricity, personalization, and new interaction paradigms between the business and its audiences. In his FASTforward 08 keynote, JP will review the inevitability as well as the benefits of IT departments embracing the User Revolution and accepting the fact that the user has gained control.

Don’t miss the chance to meet J.P. Rangaswami and hear his latest take on where the user revolution is taking us. Make time Wednesday morning 2/20, and don’t miss registering for FASTforward 08. There is still time to catch this unique event.

John Hagel will be setting the stage as lead-off speaker on the first full day of the upcoming FASTforward 2008 conference in Orlando, Tuesday Feb. 19, 2008. (It’s not too late to register here.)

You may be thinking that the quote I’ve highlighted above makes a fitting piece of commentary about trends in the markets we are operating in today, but would it surprise you to learn that John wrote those words when he was a lead principal in McKinsey & Company’s Interactive Media Practice in 1997? At the time, his book Net Gain, which investigated the dynamics and consequences of expanding markets through virtual communities was outrageously visionary as well as being a Business Week best seller.

By 1999, John was publishing another best seller, Net Worth, in which he pursued in more depth the turn toward customer-centered markets and proposed the emergence of a class of business he termed the infomediary. John forecast that as power in markets shifts to consumers and communities, a new role will emerge for trusted third parties to capture and aggregate consumer information online and then act in behalf of those consumers to get the best terms for various products and services. Things haven’t quite worked out that way yet, although some would argue that Google has built its hegemony on exactly this dynamic, channeling search-based information about user intention to advertisers, and MySpace and Facebook have begun to succeed in bundling virtual community with commercial business models to the benefit of their members.

With his long engagement in the dynamics of the “user revolution,” we’re looking forward to what John has to say about the state of the transition today and what we should look out for going forward. In his most recent book, The Only Sustainable Edge, John and co-author John Seely Brown talk about the importance to strategy of working at the many “edges” of the business and working with speed and agility.

At FASTforward08, John will be speaking on: The Impact of the User Revolution on Your Organization. He proposes that it is clear to all by now that as market power shifts to the user, it becomes increasingly critical to be able to measure the potential impact of this trend on the future of the business and its role in the industry. Unfortunately, the value of many of the intangibles that power the User Revolution – skills, information, social capital, etc. – cannot be captured and measured with traditional metrics such as ROI (Return on Investment). John, currently heading up a new Silicon Valley Research Center for Deloitte, will introduce us to a new set of leading indicators that can be used to measure and predict the impact of the User Revolution on your company.

“A topic is not a domain with edges. It is how passion focuses itself.” – David Weinberger

For those who attended FASTforward 2007, David will be familiar from an exceptional series of video interviews he conducted with keynoters like Chris Anderson, Tim O’Reilly, and Bill Inmon, practitioners like David Watson of Disney/ABC and Dorothea Herrey of Dow Jones, industry analysts like Forrester’s Matt Brown and IDC’s Sue Feldman, and, of course blogging gurus like Euan Semple and Jim McGee.

But of course Weinberger has long been a highly respected industry commentator in his own right. He is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, writes a popular blog, and is often heard on such forums as National Public Radio in the US and seen presenting keynotes at Internet-related conferences.

Many are not aware that he was once a Vice President of an Internet search engine firm, and that background helps shed light on some of the core insights to be found in his latest book, Everything is Miscellaneous.

In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David’s third book (following Cluetrain Manifesto, 2002, and Small Things Loosely Joined, 2003), he once again takes up the challenge of interpreting the changes that the Internet is bringing to our personal lives, to our social lives, and to the core assumptions that have anchored many businesses. Six years on from the publication of Cluetrain Manifesto, this is the clearest account yet of the fundamentals behind the “webiness” of the web, and how what’s different about information on the Internet is turning many operating assumptions about knowledge and about business on their heads.

At FASTforward 2008, David will be sharing his views on the 2.0 transformation and some specific ways in which 2.0 user behaviors spawn new business opportunities in places you’d probably not expect. Don’t miss the chance to catch a deep and deeply funny mind at work.

We have introduced so far Don Tapscott and Andrew McAfee from the lineup of keynote speakers at the conference. We are particularly pleased to announce here that Safa Rashtchy will be with us at the conference on Wednesday 2/20. Safa has been a star financial analyst for over a decade and a true thought leader in the emergence of Internet investment plays and the globalization of online opportunities, particularly those involving China. He’s a man who’s made a living predicting who will make money in the new world.

While Managing Director at investment bank Piper Jaffray, Safa was responsible for the seminal 2007 report: The User Revolution: The New Advertising Ecosystem and the Rise of the Internet as a Mass Medium.

In this influential and comprehensive study (the report features 217 Exhibits – we’ll let you guess the number of pages), Safa and his team lay out a cogent story about the shift of “attention” to the web, the rise of “2.0” phenomena, the increasing diversity of channels and sources, the explosion of rich media – especially video, and how all this and more is working together to create a new world for audiences, consumers, producers, and marketers online. Needless to say, one of the key findings is that search is a key business enabler in many of these developments. [Click here to see that it’s not just FAST who thinks so.]

At the conference, Safa will be giving us all a glimpse of how he sees the “user revolution” moving on from here, and the ways it will create fundamental changes in the way that companies from all industries – especially media, entertainment, retail, and communications companies – engage with their customers to drive value. Since leaving Piper in mid-2007, Safa has been traveling extensively and updating his sense of the emergent business opportunities that the trends he and the team documented in the report are creating around the world. He’s also been a featured presenter at such gatherings as the Web 2.0 Summit.

If track records are any indication, Safa’s views here will be well worth paying attention to. As a leading financial analyst for over a decade, Safa earned top rankings in The Wall Street Journal’s ” Best on the Street” analyst survey for 2002 (not a stellar year for investors, need I remind you). He was also a winner in Institutional Investor magazine’s “Home Run Hitters of 2001″ top stock pickers list.

Don’t miss the chance to learn about Safa’s top trend picks for 2008 – on view Wednesday, Feb. 20, 2008 at FASTforward, Orlando.