A few weeks ago Chess Media Group released a no-cost research report we put together on the “State of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration.”  The report was put together from survey responses of 234 executives, decision makers, and practitioners at companies around the world who are implementing emergent collaboration solutions at their organizations.  One of the questions we sought to answer was which departments are most actively engaged in or involved with Enterprise 2.0 efforts?

We found that business develop/sales, marketing/communications, and operations/IT were the top three departments that were actively engaged in Enterprise 2.0 at their organizations.  What’s actually more interesting is how the size of the company affects or influences the departments which are engaged and most actively involved in these initiatives.  For example, in a company with 100k employees would their business development/sales teams be as actively involved as they would be in a company with under 10k employees?  So, how do different size organizations see their breakdown of department involved and engagement?

When looking at this we noticed something interesting, take a look at the chart below:

Looking at the chart we notice a few things.  In smaller organizations, the Business Development/Sales department (24%) is the most engaged in Enterprise 2.0.  In medium-sized organizations, the Marketing/Communications  department is the most engaged.  Withing medium to large-size organizations, The Operations/IT department is the most engaged.  Finally, in large enterprises with 100k+ employees the Innovation/Product Development are the most engaged.

This may suggest that the objectives and strategies of small-sized organizations (<1,000 employees) is emphasis  on new business development and revenue generation, while medium-sized organizations (between 1,000 – 25,000 employees) focus on building awareness of the business, its products, and its position within the market.   Medium to large-sized  organizations  (25,000  to 100,000 employees) focus on supporting and sustaining organizational infrastructure and growth and large-sized organizations focus on staying ahead of their competition through innovation and product development.

To me this makes complete sense but what do you think about this possibility, do you think it’s fair to make that conclusion/assumption?

If you would like to get a free copy of the report you can do so by visiting the download page for the State of Enterprise 2.0 Collaboration.