According to recent research performed by AIIM of over 400 businesses, 44% of respondents said that Enterprise Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 technologies are "imperative" or of "significant importance" for their organization. Another 27% positioned Enterprise 2.0 technologies such as RSS, blogs and wikis to have an impact on business goals and success.

Although Enterprise 2.0 is generally considered strategically important, most organizations (74%) claim to have, at best, only a vague familiarity with it. The industry association AIIM has therefore introduced a new Enterprise 2.0 training program on the use of Web 2.0 technologies to improve collaboration and retain knowledge within an enterprise, but also to reduce the dependency of email as a collaboration platform.

Harvard Professor Andrew McAfee defines Enterprise 2.0 as the "use of emergent social software platforms within companies, or between companies and their partners or customers." AIIM research shows that most organizations look at Enterprise 2.0 as the application of Web 2.0 to the enterprise, next generation of Enterprise Content Management technology, or as technology that enables people to collaborate and/or form online communities. The use of Web 2.0 technologies on the commercial Web is, according to the AIIM research, a driving factor for the Enterprise 2.0 market. Exposure to technology and tools such as Facebook, iTunes, YouTube, Google, and Wikipedia are raising the bar on user expectations concerning interfaces, collaboration and content access not only on the Web but on the intranet as well.

When asked to identify the primary accomplishment targeted by Enterprise 2.0 implementations, 69% of respondents in the AIIM survey pointed to "increase collaboration." Virtual collaborative teams are also being established at the intra-corporate level, as extended-enterprise models and outsourcing/off-shoring becomes more popular. These business models place a great deal of focus on the need to support collaboration that spans time and space (i.e., the type of collaboration provided by Enterprise 2.0 platforms). In fact, when asked which business goals and objectives would be impacted by Enterprise 2.0, knowledge management (i.e., increased capture of corporate knowledge) ranked second only to increased collaboration within the organization.

Responses to the survey further reveal that most organizations are not addressing Enterprise 2.0 strategically (which leads to the chasm between perceived critical need and level of understanding). Forty-five percent of the surveyed organizations are predominately deploying Enterprise 2.0 technologies in an ad hoc manner. Only 26% of the organizations are taking a mostly, or exclusively strategic approach to Enterprise 2.0 technology deployment. But further analysis unveiled in the report, a paradox in the current market. Although Enterprise 2.0 is generally considered strategically important, most organizations (74%) claim to have, at best, only a vague familiarity with it -- 41% stated there was no clear understanding.

Wikis, social networking, blogs, search and RSS feeds are, according to AIIM, considered important components of Enterprise 2.0 with a combined 46-51% likelihood of being implemented or acquired. Given the perceived value of consumer-oriented "social media services" such as YouTube, the low rankings of social book marking and social ranking/voting in an Enterprise 2.0 setting is somewhat surprising. These would be among the least expensive and easiest methods and functions to graft on as social interaction in existing enterprise content systems, yet are predominately ranked as "No Plans to Acquire/Use."

"Lack of Understanding/Appreciation" was the top challenge reported (59%), followed closely by "Corporate Culture" and "Lack of a Business Case (ROI)." Given the lack of understanding of Enterprise 2.0 as a concept, and the adoption curve, this should be no surprise.

The industry association AIIM has developed an Enterprise 2.0 training course in best practices for using Web 2.0 technologies to improve collaboration and knowledge management within an enterprise. This vendor neutral training program was developed by AIIM based on learning objectives defined by an advisory panel consisting of some of the industry's foremost thinkers on Enterprise 2.0.

Source: AIIM - The ECM Association