Cloak and dagger work on Enterprise 2.0
Jinfo Blog

11th August 2009

By Tim Buckley Owen

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Another day, another report on social networking for the enterprise – but this one has the imprimatur of web usability guru Jakob Nielsen. Enterprise 2.0: Social Networking on Intranets finds some companies beginning to make productive use of social intranet features. Published by the Nielsen Norman Group (summary at http://digbig.com/5badyj, purchase details at http://digbig.com/5badyh), the report profiles practice in 14 companies globally. Most are not very far along in their wholesale adoption of 2.0 technology yet; in the current economic climate, ‘rushing to add “tools that teenagers use” to the company intranet might not be a high priority,’ Nielsen acknowledges. But companies can’t just ‘draw a line in the sand’ and say it's okay for employees to use Web 2.0 to communicate with customers, but not with each other, Nielsen continues. It’s an interesting observation – especially in the light of findings from another recent survey highlighting how differently consumers and business executives can think about the same issue. What’s particularly intriguing about this second survey is not so much the topic – differing views on advertising between advertisers and audiences – so much as the way it’s been carried out. It’s the first in an ongoing collaboration between the polling organisation Harris Interactive and the Research Network of the business social networking site LinkedIn (summary at http://digbig.com/5badyk). ‘We see LinkedIn and its critical mass of senior business executives across all industries, company sizes and geographical locations as an ideal partner for these kinds of polls,’ says Harris’s George Terhanian. Indeed it is, but not perhaps in ways that might have been anticipated; time and again in this survey, advertisers’ and consumers’ perceptions are poles apart. No question that the Harris/LinkedIn survey produces valuable marketing data – but it may also highlight flaws in the way executives sometimes see the world. And some of the Nielsen report’s findings suggest similar flaws in executives’ view of their own organisations too. Successful Enterprise 2.0 applications tend to have emerged from underground, grassroots efforts, Nielsen says. ‘Users are more likely than executives to see the tools’ value and translate that value to an internal use.’ How much longer will such undercover operations have to continue? According to a recent report from enterprise content management specialist AIIM (http://digbig.com/5badyn – registration required), business take up of Enterprise 2.0 has doubled in the last year. However – and reflecting the Nielsen findings – only 25% of organisations are actually doing anything about it yet. Admittedly that’s more than double the number in AIIM’s previous survey – but it looks as if the cloak and dagger work on Enterprise 2.0 may have to continue for some time to come.

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