Report Overview:
When AIIM first reported on Enterprise 2.0 at the start of 2008, they found that early adopters were achieving real business value, transforming the way their organizations share information, encourage contribution, and work together as productive project teams. As “Web 2.0 for business”, Enterprise 2.0 seemed to offer new ways for a diverse and distributed workforce to utilize social networking for knowledge sharing and the rapid deployment of expertise.
Since that first report, use of social media outside of work has continued to grow rapidly, fuelled by new arrivals such as Twitter. This has spilled over into demands for similar tools in the workplace, particularly from the younger generation and the understanding and take up of Enterprise 2.0 solutions by business has more than doubled.
Viral marketing and customer engagement through social media is high on the corporate agenda, and this is feeding back into the business as a need for alternative communications channels and more vibrant knowledge sharing communities.
The definition and understanding of Enterprise 2.0 is still in some flux. For some it is seen as a step change in business communication, based on the revolution of social media on the web. For others it is the bringing together of collaboration tools, forums, portals, and messaging into a cohesive business platform. In this report, when using the term, “Enterprise 2.0” AIIM is referring to the business use of technologies, such as blogs, wikis, forums, messaging, tagging, RSS feeds and rich media, popularized by social sites such as Wikipedia, YouTube, Facebook, TypePad and Twitter. In using “collaboration” they are referring to document sharing team-sites and portal applications like SharePoint, eRoom and WebCenter. A full glossary of terms is given in Appendix Two.
By their nature, Enterprise 2.0 technologies encourage openness and sharing, with their focus on user-generated content. This creates an exposure of businesses to possible brand damage, and indeed, potential legal and compliance issues. As seen in the report, many are not even taking the basic steps towards protective policies, whereas others are struggling to embrace and encourage their use without imposing overly restrictive governance and usage policies.
Seen as the enablers of document-centric collaboration, and the custodians of unstructured content, ECM vendors have responded very quickly to provide businesses with the tools for this revolution, working to replace the pure-play technology pioneers. The report looks at user-intentions regarding integration with existing content management systems, and whether ECM vendors can supply the governance that makes Enterprise 2.0 a safe place to play, so that it might truly become the future of business.
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