Chess Media Group recently released “The State of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration” report which collected survey responses from 234 executives and decision makers implementing these collaborative solutions in their workplace. The report covers things such as business drivers, ROI, types of tools that are being used, how budgets are being allocated, and how strategies are being developed. The report is completely free to download.
Based on the responses from these individuals we were able to identify five key trends.
Business managers and IT managers are beginning to work more closely together to co-own and co-sponsor emergent collaboration initiatives.
Despite this trend, business units independently own and sponsor emergent collaboration projects twice as frequently as IT departments. With the low barrier to entry of emergent collaboration solutions, business unit managers are now more inclined to deploy their own solutions without the approval or cooperation of IT.
There is not a strong enough focus on developing an enterprise strategy before deploying a technology platform.
While a growing number of organizations are thinking about their emergent collaboration strategies, a large proportion of companies are either implementing a tool first or are engaging in a “test it and see what happens” approach.
Organizations are stuck in the “value paradox.”
Managers within companies are challenged with seeing the ROI of Enterprise 2.0 and are uncertain of the business value of emergent strategies and tools. However, most companies are not defining performance indicators to measure any type of success or progress. Those that are defining them do not actually have a tracking or measurement system in place. Without having a process evaluate results, it is impossible to see any type of tangible or intangible value or business benefit.
Solving a business problem or achieving an objective is just as good as being able to show a financial ROI.
Financial drivers are not the primary justification for an emergent collaboration initiative. Business value to the organization has many faces: the ability to discover people, expertise and relevant information quickly and easily; improved and increased communication and collaboration across the organization; innovation and creativity to achieve performance excellence; and broken-down silos across business units to tap collective intelligence and solve business problems or achieve common objectives.
A combination of both a structured and unstructured approach is the most successful and commonly used approach by organizations.
Organizations that practice a mix of a structured and unstructured approach see a higher level of engaged employees and a greater likelihood that usage will continue to increase over time. Organizations that focus purely on a structured approach see the poorest performance in terms of usage and engaged employees.
The full report covers these five trends in much greater depth along with many other topics and is complete with charts and graphs. Head over to the Chess website to download your free copy of “The State of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration” report.
