How should an IT team start thinking about an Enterprise 2.0 strategy? One way is to carve it into two main areas. The first is Web-based information sharing--think business versions of Wikipedia, MySpace, and Flickr. A sizable minority of companies are finding effective business uses for blogs, wikis, syndicated feeds, pervasive search, social networking, collaborative content portals like SharePoint, and mashups that use easier-to-integrate APIs and fast-response development techniques such as Ajax. One example: Wikis, which let multiple people access and edit a document online, are widely used at 6% of companies in our survey and used effectively by a few employees at 25% of companies.
The second area is voice and messaging, where voice over IP, instant messaging, presence, videoconferencing, and unified communications can make it possible to connect people in more relevant ways. Unified communications entails the blending of voice calls, video, and messages, coupled with functionality like embedded click-to-call links in documents and contact lists and the ability to see if colleagues and partners are available to chat. It's widely used at 13% of companies surveyed and effectively by a few at 24%.
Great quote from Eric Knorr. He hits the nail on the head here, pointing out the problem Office 2.0 Web Apps and SaaS apps face: If these Web wonders have interoperability and high fidelity document exchange with MSOffice, their collaborative features are value added wonders for existing business processes and workgroup-workflow scenarios. If, on the other hand they lack this level of interop - integration with MSOffice documents and processes, the value add becomes a problematic split in a business process. The only way to overcome that kind of a split is to take the entire process. Which is difficult for lightweight mashup happy web wonders to do.
