The Enterprise 2.0 Adoption Council released the results from a survey they conducted with its members (77 responded out of around 100).  The results from the survey revealed a lot of interesting information about Enterprise 2.0 and how some of the largest companies in the world are adapting to the change.  I questioned the validity of Enterprise 2.0 a few weeks ago because I didn’t believe that enough companies were committed (in terms of time and money) to actually make this change happen (even though I believe they must).  If you read that previous post you will understand what I mean.  I’m particularly interested in the survey because Chess Media Group is involved in social business consulting.

So where are we in the whole Enterprise 2.0 adoption cycle according to the Council?

As you can we’re still quite early with over 60% of the companies believing that we are still in the early adoption and/or innovators phase of Enterprise 2.0.  I’m not that surprised with these results at all.  Based on the conversations I’ve been having with companies in the space, I know this is something they are thinking about and trying to plan for; however they are still not actually acting.  This is going to change throughout 2010.

The report says that budgets are quite healthy but with 41% of the companies looking to spend $500k or under, I don’t see how this can be possible.  Software vendors such as Jive or SocialText charge around that price for an enterprise size client annually, and we’re just talking about the tool.  There’s also needs to be an entire strategy developed and rolled out (not to mention a team created).  The budget needs to be spent on developing the strategy and not on paying for the tools (at least not yet).

The good news though is that a lot of companies are more realistic with their budgets placing them in the $1 mil+ range which is something that I think is much more realistic for an enterprise.  These companies are looking for global solutions and that is going to cost time and money.  Personally, I would love some more clarification on exactly where these budgets are going, i.e. tools or strategies?

What’s also interesting is that 34% of the companies surveyed said that they have multiple projects in the pipeline which are going to be rolled out.  26% of companies said they have some sort of pilot project running and 30% of companies said that they already have some projects implemented.  Keep in mind that this is based off of the 77 companies that responded to the survey so we’re only talking about around 25 companies that actually have multiple projects in the pipeline.  The enterprise space is huge, and it’s great to  know that a few companies are out there leading the way.

Some of you may be surprised by these numbers but perhaps not.  Overall, it looks like there is a pretty even distribution among the four choices as to who is leading the Enterprise 2.0 charge.  It appears that management (alone) is not the core driver behind the Enterprise 2.0 push.  It’s also interesting to see there is an equal percentage of this shift happening with both users and managers on either a per chance or orchestrated basis.  In 2010 I’m hoping we see a much more orchestrated approach to this effort.  The fact that the user driven force has been the greatest for E2.0 speaks volumes in that managers are clearly listening to what their employees are saying and doing.

Finally we have the dreaded ROI number to deal with.  Clearly most companies are not able to see or understand the ROI from their efforts.  I think the key challenge is that ROI for a lot of social media and social business doesn’t come when you expect it to.  One day an employee can share something on a collaboration platform that might save the company millions of dollars across the board, however that change might not happen in the first 1-3 months.  The point here is that we are talking about an evolution of business.  Perhaps as a starting point we can look at things such as increased employee productivity and time saved on trivial tasks (such as email or searching for documents).

I think the report does a great job of shedding more much needed light on the Enterprise 2.0 space, however this report only tells a small part of the story.  What do we even mean by Enterprise 2.0?  If a company implements an internal collaboration tool such as Jive, are they now an Enterprise 2.0 company?  What if they have multiple tools in place?  Can you see where the line here gets a a little blurry?  Furthermore, I want to understand where the budgets are being spent and how these programs are being deployed.  I’m pretty sure that most of these budgets are being spent on tools and not on strategies, I’m also not convinced that these companies are deploying on a global scale; perhaps just departmentally to start.  Either way there are still a lot of unanswered questions in my book, especially since I think that a lot of companies are still in the testing phase and are not too sure what to do or what to expect.

What do you think of the report?  Have any questions?