Late last year, my colleague Subha Rama released a report on the use of Enterprise 2.0 technologies in the workplace. As part of her research, she highlighted five key drivers for use of Enterprise 2.0 tools in business organizations:* Nurturing Innovation: Most organizational structures today resist creativity. Web 2.0 technologies allow innovation to percolate across the organization in the form of new ideas and novel workarounds to nagging problems. More importantly, they make it easier to disseminate knowledge across the organization.
* Enhancing Processes: Enterprise 2.0 technology can enable better internal processes and seamless knowledge transfer, which in turn can help create a truly networked organization, linking the enterprise with suppliers, partners and customers. Better still, these interactions can be achieved at a much lower cost than with other, older technologies.
* Return on Investments (ROI) Benefits: Enterprises are seeing that interactions among customers, partners and the organization itself are delivering measurable ROI benefits due to easy access to expert knowledge, reduced travel, shorter product development cycles, and a lower cost of interactions.
* Knowledge Management and Wider Community Engagement: Organizations are deploying technologies such as wikis, blogs and podcasts to nurture collaborative practices among employees. But they re also deploying more advanced Enterprise 2.0 tools, using knowledge sharing and feedback to realize broader goals such as workforce advancement. A growing number of organizations believe that social media deployed in the enterprise is capable of enhancing knowledge sharing not only internally but also in sourcing expertise residing outside the enterprise. They are using it to nurture customer relationships, build brand equity, and leverage best practices in recruitment and employee development.
* New Approaches to Familiar Challenges: Enterprise 2.0 applications are ushering in fundamental changes to the ways in which enterprises work. For example, the Chinese motorcycle industry is adopting cloud sourcing, a more effective collaborative model in which thousands of suppliers work together to design and manufacture motorcycles--rather than using traditional, tightly process-controlled manufacturing environments. This approach has helped the industry roll out new models much more quickly and more cost-effectively. Other technologies that are gaining popularity are folksonomy and user-based tagging for managing data and making it searchable (consumer examples include del.icio.us, 43things.com, Flickr, and Technorati).
In the complete study, Subha offers a detailed analysis of use cases for Enterprise 2.0 technology, and she drills down on the relative merits of a number of leading players in the industry. Frost & Sullivan clients can download the full report at www.frost.com.
