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By Mel Duvall
Enterprise 2.0 technologies have moved beyond buzzword status and have taken firm root in a clear majority of enterprises, according to a report released this week by AMR Research.
The Boston-based research firm found that 64% of companies now say they have implemented some form of Web 2.0 technologies within their enterprises—hence the term Enterprise 2.0. Those technologies range from Web services to blogs, wikis, social networking, podcasts, and instant messaging/ presence applications.
"In most organizations it's clearly moved beyond, the 'let's try it and see if it works' stage to where companies are using these technologies to gain real value," says AMR analyst Chris Fletcher. In many instances companies are using Enterprise 2.0 to reach out to customers to either provide them with more information through such applications as Wikis, or to create a one-to-one connections through instant messaging and social networking.
Among the findings in the report are that the top departmental users of Enterprise 2.0 technologies include IT, sales and marketing, customer service, research and development and corporate communications. Of those surveyed, 57% said customer-facing applications used to improve customer service or to enhance sales efforts are the most important drivers behind adoption of Enterprise 2.0.
Of those technologies being used, Web services appears to have the deepest penetration with 78% of companies either currently using or in the process of having Web services implemented. Web services is a broad description for a means of using Web-based technologies, such as eXtensible markup language (XML), simple object access protocol (SOAP) and Web services description language (WDSL), to provide applications with a means to interact with one another. Next in line are instant messaging/presence applications at 64%, followed by collective intelligence, 60%, Wikis, 57%, RSS, 56%, and blogs and podcasts, both at 53%. While social networking was not among the top seven technologies in use, Fletcher says it is poised to make a big jump up the list. "It is clearly gaining a lot of attention right now - think Facebook for the enterprise," he says.
The life sciences sector appears to be leading the pack in terms of where Enterprise 2.0 technologies are being adopted at 52%. Next is the high tech sector at 36%, followed by industrial manufacturing companies, 25%, and retail, 23%.
Fletcher says an interesting finding from the study is that there seems to be a disconnect between how technology departments view their adoption of Enterprise 2.0 technologies and how they are seen by other departments. The survey found that 60% of IT respondents felt their own departments were the primary users of Enterprise 2.0. However, 49% of line of business respondents, particularly those with customer-facing responsibilities such as customer service, sales and marketing, felt they made the most use of Enterprise 2.0.
"I think what this is telling [IT executives] is that you should take a walk around the company and see what people are using," says Fletcher. "I think you'll be surprised to see how many are already using different Enterprise 2.0 technologies."
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