Market Trends
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Many industry professionals see Enterprise 2.0 as the next step in the evolution of the office - from a silo approach to a connected approach. As “Web 2.0 for business”, Enterprise 2.0 seemed to offer new ways for a diverse and distributed workforce to utilize social networking for knowledge sharing and the rapid deployment of expertise.
Factors driving and impacting the adoption of Enterprise 2.0:
- Social technologies open up new opportunities to tap into the information locked up in employees and customers and to tap into a much broader network of associates.
- Email is declining as the primary means by which individuals in organizations stay aware of what is going on within their organizations.
- Retiring baby boomers and elimination of “career” employees is creating knowledge retention productivity drains for organizations.
- New people coming into the workplace are dramatically changing expectations regarding simplicity, access, mobility, and connectivity.
- Technology innovation is being driven by consumer IT, not enterprise IT.
- “The business” increasingly views legacy enterprise IT requirements as a drag on implementing innovative new solutions.
- The information coming into organizations is more complex (e.g., video and images and voice) than the text-centric information of the past — both in terms of how it is managed and how it is stored.
- Socially-generated information is creating new information management and control/ediscovery challenges for organizations.
- The push to SharePoint as the primary point of intersection for the knowledge worker will intensify. The pool of solution providers building applications upon SharePoint will expand dramatically.
- Reactions against SharePoint will intensify as awareness of its complexity grows and as concerns increase about reliance on a single technology stack.
- The knowledge worker will replace the document or records practitioner as the primary focus of those who care about managing content within organizations.
- “Location-aware” information will increase in importance as deployment of smart mobile devices accelerates.
- Mobile devices will become the de facto means of content interaction.
Levels of Organizational UseWhen AIIM surveyed business attitudes to Enterprise 2.0 at the beginning of 2008, understanding of the terminology was patchy, and there was confusion about the potential benefits. But the understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is and how it could help the business has doubled from 2008 to 2009. 25% of organizations report to actively addressing it, which is twice the number compared to last year. The ready availability of Enterprise 2.0 tools in software as a service (SaaS) mode gives also rise to rogue usage under the corporate radar in 24% of organizations.
Business DriversBetter use of shared knowledge seems to be a key driver within the corporation, followed by improved collaboration and faster communication. These are very much soft dollar benefits but they outweigh the more tangible savings in reduced travel costs and faster time-to-market.
As project groups and work teams become more geographically dispersed, the need arises for better methods of document sharing and community messaging. The concept of team sites is a mix of shared document areas, intranet-like pages, instant messaging, portals and discussion areas. Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as wikis, user-generated Web pages, forums, expertise profiles, and tagging have provided a rich and flexible toolkit of applications which are increasingly being brought together under the umbrella of collaboration platforms, with document sharing at their heart.
GovernanceAIIM research in 2009 indicated that content generated within Enterprise 2.0 applications was the least well managed of the content types. AIIM found that whereas nearly all businesses have policies on the use and content of emails, only 30% set similar policies for blogs, wikis and forums. However, 45% of organizations have set a policy to ban access to social networking sites from desktops – generally to prevent time-wasting during working hours.
Links to ResearchAIIM Industry Watch: Collaboration and Enterprise 2.0: Work-Meets-Play or the Future of Business? http://www.aiim.org/ResourceCenter/Research/MarketIQ/Article.aspx?ID=36789
