Blog: Colin White

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March 31, 2008

New Report on Enterprise 2.0 from AIIM

AIIM - The Enterprise Content Management Association - recently published a detailed report and survey ("Enterprise 2.0: Agile, Emergent & Integrated") on Enterprise 2.0 (see www.aiim.org). The report provides some fascinating insight into how organizations view and are using Enterprise 2.0.

The report proposes a new definition for Enterprise 2.0: "A system of Web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence, and integration capabilities in the extended enterprise." One of the reasons given for this new definition is the poor understanding of Web 2.0, which is often closely associated with Enterprise 2.0. In fact many people describe Enterprise 2.0 as the use of Web 2.0 in the enterprise.

Some 44% of the 441 survey respondents said that Enterprise 2.0 (as a technology and a practice) is imperative or signifiant to achieving the organization's overall business goals and success. However, 41% of respondents said there was no clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is in their organization. These latter two results seem to contradict each other - people think the concept is critical to success, but are unsure what it is!

The reason for these odd results is that most people are familiar with several of the technologies usually associated with Enterprise 2.0, but are still unsure how they fit together to provide a complete solution.

Improved collaboration was often cited in the report as the main objective of Enterprise 2.0, but the term "collaboration" here has a broader meaning than its traditional definition. In this case, collaboration includes information and knowledge sharing, and also social networking. This is an important point because I think that collaboration today has a broader meaning than it has in the past.

The main inhibitor to adoption of Enterprise 2.0 appears to be lack of control and increased security concerns (42% of respondents). There is nothing new here, but it does show that traditional governance approaches have to be modernized in order for Enterprise 2.0 to be successful.

The results of this report are clearly inline with the direction of the BI industry, which is beginning to focus on the impact of modern collaborative and social networking techniques and Web content on BI processing.

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