IM Most Valuable Web 2.0 Tool for Enterprise
A new Forrester report states that Instant Messenging (IM) is by far the most valuable 'web 2.0' tool for enterprises:
"Web 2.0 tools and technologies are the latest in a long line of technologies that have taken root with consumers who then smuggle them into the business world. IM is one notable example. To this point, the Web 2.0 tools that we inquired about fall well short of the value that businesspeople associate with IM. Thirty-seven percent of respondents reported substantial business value from IM, compared with an average of just 16% for the other Web 2.0 tools."
The report was compiled based on feedback from 275 IT decision-makers. Other than IM, the report found that RSS and podcasting showed "the highest average business value", while social networking and blogging showed the lowest. RSS is mostly being used in enterprises for corporate communications or content aggregation, while only one in three Forrester respondents uses RSS for external marketing purposes.
Source: Forrester
Forrester concluded that those firms with the largest number of tools deployed saw the best value, although no "killer combination" of tools has emerged. Perhaps this is because the big players, like Google and Microsoft, have yet to come up with effective Web Office suites.
In terms of measuring the success of web 2.0 tools, Forrester states that most firms use traditional value measurement techniques like ROI and total cost of ownership (TCO). The most popular benefits cited by IT leaders are 'soft' benefits like business efficiency and competitive advantage. All of this indicates that Web 2.0 is still very difficult to measure.
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I wonder how e-mail compares... in particular, the quality of the communication. Radicati predicts that the average enterprise user will encounter close to 200 e-mail messages per day.
With that much e-mail, what's the quality like? How will people stay organized?
I can only imagine that instant messaging will eventually become the same way as it becomes more mainstream in the enterprise. Instead of receiving the occasional IM, people will be flipping through 10 different IM screens.
It'd be interesting to also go back 25 years and see how many businesses thought typewriters were more useful than computers :)
Posted by: Robert Dewey | July 29, 2007 6:41 PM
Finally a report that will motivate more corporations into recognizing the potential of true online customer service =)
Posted by: Half-Geek | July 29, 2007 6:54 PM
IM is Web 2.0? Hmm.
Posted by: aaron | July 29, 2007 7:53 PM
What's interesting to me is to blogs at the bottom of that list. Frankly, I think it's the term that might turn a lot of businesses off form the idea of maintaining a blog. I eventually was able to sell a client on the idea when I explained to him he could basically use it as a means of archiving his newsletters and announcements. He still didn't like the term "blog", thought it lacked a kind of professionalism, but he saw the value there and it's worked out great for him.
Blogging is a great, painless way for businesses to continually "build" the content on their site without having to go to a designer or developer every time they want to add something. Then again, it's not so great a tool for communicating with people within your business, which the other things on this list are certainly better at.
Posted by: George Mandis | July 29, 2007 9:05 PM
I have to wonder what is going to happen to the business owners who are still struggling to come to grips with email when we all start using IM at work? The way you communicate over IM is even more different again than email is from traditional letters, and I've come across a lot of people who don't even really understand that difference yet.
Posted by: Cassandra Goodwin | July 29, 2007 10:59 PM
Cassandra, if there are business owners still struggling to come to grips with email then they'll need to find someone else to manage their business, if they haven't already.
But these are "Enterprises" Richard is talking about and hence they'll all be e-mailing eachother like crazy, and be positively fed up with it by now.
But why on earth they're calling Instant Messaging (a technology from 1996 that's mostly *not* on the web) "Web 2.0" is quite beyond me.
Posted by: Seth Wagoner | July 30, 2007 1:41 AM
Agree. Why would instant messaging, a technology that has been around for some time, be considered Web 2.0? You might be able to argue that some recent/emeging browser-based IM clients could possibly qualify (e.g., Meebo)or a tool like Twitter - but enterprise instant messaging? Is the report really saying that IM products from IBM and Microsoft "Web 2.0"?
Without a set of criteria to apply, what technologies and products are "in" and "out" concerning 1.0 vs. 2.0 will remain very subjective, and in this case, kind of odd.
Posted by: Mike Gotta | July 30, 2007 3:50 AM
IM is not Web 2.0, it's been around longer than the web itself.
Posted by: Anonymous Coward | July 30, 2007 4:22 AM
I agree with George - I think naming has a lot to do with it.
When a company hears social network, management undoubtedly things of MySpace, pedophiles, and being off task. The 13 percent that DO get it are the ones that see internal social networking as a means to 1) help manage work flow, 2) help make communication between individuals more efficient, 3) provide specific analytics in terms of department communication, etc..
Enterprise social network shouldn't be MySpace ported to the work environment. It should be an underlying platform that is invisible, where communication defines the network itself (IM communication, e-mail, document interaction, etc). From there, the enterprise can build or extend the sociality to any application they choose.
Posted by: Robert Dewey | July 30, 2007 7:24 AM
The remarkable news here is that, with exception of social networking, all these items match up well at "having value" in that all receive at least "limited value" for at least 90% of those surveyed, and all have at least 60% chiming in with "Moderate Value" or better. IT Execs are warming up to E2.0, turning the corner from, perhaps, feeling that these technologies are distracting and value degrading. More on this in Detailed data aside, executives back E2.0
A few commentors question the inclusion of IM on this chart. Agreed!
There is a value mismatch here between technologies that create value vs. those that help folks exploit the creation of that value.
Wikis, blogs and social networking generally are a means of collaborating on the web. RSS and Podcasting are generally a means for notification, with Podcasting, by and large, just being a subset of RSS.
RSS and Podcasting, in a way, provide the least logical value in that they don't lend to value creation like the wiki and blog tools which generate the content that goes down the RSS and podcasting channels. However, given the 80/20 rule, or even the 99/1 rule, for lurkers vs. participators, most people will have and regularly use tools created to pay attention to the content value created by the few.
Over time, however, enterprises taking wikis and blogs as a strategic initiative will turn beta bloggers from lurkers to active participators.
Posted by: Jordan Frank | July 30, 2007 10:09 AM
IM "Web 2.0"? I don't think so. Anyway, I believe the largest hurdle to Web 2.0 adoption on the enterprise is a true understanding of what these tools can do. Working in a large corporate environment myself, it's interesting to see how the average business person tends to shy away from something they don't know about, and seem to be even more unwilling to take some time out of their "busy" day to learn. And who are these so-called 275 IT "decision-makers"? Judging from the misinformed decision-makers at my organization, I'm not surprised that IM is on top of the Web 2.0 list, even thought their truly not "Web 2.0".
Posted by: Jay Myers | July 30, 2007 11:40 AM
I had the same reactions of many of you while reading IM listed as Web 2.0 service. Perhaps in the mind of many so called experts anything which is not in the traditional pattern of "make a query on a db and present a semi-static web page" is Web 2.0, or, even worse, anything they don't understand how it works ;)
Anyway IM and Presence may be the backbone for most of Web 2.0 applications: each time you think about real time collaboration, social networks, sharing data among communities with similar interests, server push, you are thinking of one of the features of IM...
Posted by: Fabio Forno | August 9, 2007 5:27 AM