A new survey of the personal use of Web 2.0 applications by CIOs emerged late last week and provided another interesting, if high-level, datapoint about the future of Web 2.0 in the enterprise. Carried out by CIO Insight, the survey reported the usual trends like high rates of use of wikis, blogs, and RSS, as well as a few unexpected outliers, like 39% of CIOs listen to podcasts.
Only 5% of UK corporations use blogs on a regular basis, according to the WebTrends-commissioned “Marketing in the Dark” report, conducted by Loudhouse Research in January 2007.
WebTrends contrasted this finding with the 85% of marketers who thought an effective Web presence was important in achieving sales and marketing objectives.
“Blogging is much more than a ‘nice to have’ in business today,” said Nick Sharp, vice president and general manager of Europe, the Middle East and Africa at WebTrends, in a statement. “Corporate blogs can be very effective communication tools within or on behalf of a corporate community.”
“Becoming an early adopter of new technologies requires companies to take significant risks - grappling with unproven tools and vendors that may not survive, for instance - in the hopes of getting an edge on the competition. But stalling those investments based on fear, uncertainty or confidence in existing technologies, or worse, doing nothing at all, can destroy a company’s ability to compete.
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Adopting emerging technologies appears to pay off, and on the face of it, sooner rather than later. More than 90 percent of respondents to CIO Insight’s latest Emerging Technologies Survey who claimed to be early adopters said their companies saw significant payoff from adopting emerging technologies.
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… despite different strategies for emerging technology adoption, IT executives and academics say one thing is clear: Reliance on new technologies is risky, and companies should implement them primarily to create competitive advantage or solve critical business needs.
“… those who aspire to the CEO title need to understand that the ego-fired, command-and-control, “winning-at-all-costs” approach is no longer viable. Instead, by measuring success through the success of all those they serve, they will achieve superlative, sustainable results not only for their constituents but also for themselves.”
Via BusinessWeek.
Demand for their 2.0 products is strong, especially in the tech and financial services industries.
“This is all in the early stages,” said James Manyika, an analyst with consultant McKinsey & Co.
Part of the Enterprise 2.0 trend is more use of blogs to strengthen communication on intranets, an organization’s private network.
The aim is to better distribute information, and to get more employees contributing information.
Janssen-Cilag is one of the fastest growing, research based pharmaceutical companies in Australia. It has more than 300 employees, split across Australia and New Zealand with around half based in the field. It is one of 250 Johnson & Johnson operating companies, which total about 121,000 employees across 57 countries.
In 2006, Janssen-Cilag completely replaced its simple, static HTML intranet with a Wiki solution. Over the 16 months since launch, it has dramatically transformed internal communication and continues to increase in both visits and content contributions each month.
Co-founder Biz Stone says Twitter was not intended for businesses, but possible uses have emerged. “Twitter works well for distributed teams and in-conference environments,” he says. “We’re keeping an eye on user behavior so we can learn more and grow the service where it makes sense.” Twitter could compliment existing tools, if not replace them. “There are plenty of tools for getting work done that are more sophisticated than Twitter,” Stone acknowledges. “For collaborative documenting, a wiki is certainly a smart choice and for an actual,synchronous conversation, I’d recommend IM or a phone call.”
Historically, corporate IT departments have been responsible for all the technology that their companies’ employees use. But that’s no longer the case, as many tech-savvy employees bring tools they find at their neighborhood Best Buy or on the Internet into the workplace. Employees swear that using these tools makes them more productive, leaving corporate IT in the uncomfortable position of having to enforce unpopular rules, even if it comes at the expense of increased productivity.
This is leading to a new psychological phenomenon that Tom Austin, an analyst at research firm Gartner is calling IT guilt. While some in IT - particularly technicians and mid-level managers - feel the need to crack down on consumer technology, many senior-level IT execs have recognized that they simply can’t support everything that employees need to do.
It’s been a while already that Sun adopted blogging (see blogs.sun.com). Now, the company taps into wikis as well: wikis.sun.com.
Via ongoing.
