I had the pleasure over the past several months to serve on the advisory panel for the AIIM’s Market IQ study on Enterprise 2.0. Carl Frappaolo, who is leading the work, reviewed the highlights of the survey results at a webinar this afternoon. The full report is available on the AIIM Market IQ site. The broadcast of the webinar will be available by April 1.

Overall, the results from surveying 441 end users of “enterprise 2.0″ showed that there is not yet a clear consensus on what E2.0 is, that companies are in varying degrees of understanding it, that the business benefits at present seem to be tied to improving collaboration, and that KM-inclined organizations are farther along than organizations that are not KM-inclined.

One of the more difficult tasks that Carl and his partner Dan Keldsen undertook was to define Enterprise 2.0 (if you read the full document linked above you’ll see the interchange amongst the advisory panel members about this exercise):

“A system of web-based technologies that provide rapid and agile collaboration, information sharing, emergence and integration capabilities.”

Each word is significant, but the most intriguing themes (to my mind) are those that titled today’s briefing: agile, emergent, and integrated.

The results indicated ambivalence about Enterprise 2.0, which is in part because of the difficulty of defining it and its benefits:

• 44% of respondents indicated that Enterprise 2.0 is imperative or significant to their organization, but
• Only 13% said they were both aware of Enterprise 2.0 and were expressly addressing it
• (74% said that they were only vaguely familiar with it or had “no clear understanding”)

The study addresses the question, “what technologies are — and which are not — specifically included in Enterprise 2.0.” Frappaolo and Keldsen put into the category technologies that pass the SLATES ($$) test. Applications and tools specifically identified as Enterprise 2.0: blogs, wikis, RSS, voting/ranking,mashups, social bookmarking, podcasting. Carl emphasizes, however, that an enterprise 2.0 system must also include search, collaborative filtering, portals, the building blocks of interactivity. It’s about integration and evolution as far as the adoption and deployment go, however revolutionarily the paradigm has shifted (my words, not Carl’s).

In general, the survey shows that the goals of Enterprise 2.0 tend to match up with the benefits that companies who are deploying some of these tools are seeing: increased collaboration inside the organization, increased capture of corporate knowledge. forty-six percent (46%) of deployments are either exclusively or mostly ad hoc, and another 28% of deployments are mixed strategic and ad hoc. In companies that have performed an ROI on E2.0 projects, only 23% were able to report a positive ROI. (Measurement of the value of social media is extremely difficult, as Carl noted. Those of us who have been — like Carl and Dan — in the KM business for years understand this. The impact of implementing social technologies can only be understood as a second or third order removed from an actual transaction. That’s just darned hard to track.)

Given the earlier statistic about how well Enterprise 2.0 is understood, it’s not a surprise that in listing the barriers to adoption of Enterprise 2.0, 59% stated the “lack of understanding/appreciation.” Others:

• Corporate culture (49%)
• Lack of business case (ROI) (42%)
• Immaturity of technology (39%)
• Potential security violations (leaking) (36%)
• Cost (32%)

The respondents who were KM-inclined were identified by questions embedded in the survey that that surfaced cultural attitudes toward knowledge sharing. Thus the results illustrate (not surprisingly) that organizations that already have an inclination toward knowledge-sharing see more conversations about Enterprise 2.0 and what the technologies offer. This suggests that a core element of an Enterprise 2.0 strategy is to understand where the culture is a cultural continuum defined by the end points:

Isolated protectionism <–> Fully engaged and extended

Culture still trumps everything. And a part of the culture that has to be addressed includes some of the tough questions on security, governance, process and publishing, and findability (which includes sensitivity to what people make public or private).There are some hard questions, but meanwhile, it appears that those companies who are following common law rule of “permit whatever is not explicitly prohibited”* are seeing benefits.

My favorite moment in the briefing came early on. Carl shows a very clever juxtaposition of Time magazine covers:

• 1983: PCs are the “machine of the year.”
• 2007: “the person of the year is YOU”

In the former, a person is looking at a PC. In the latter, Carl puts the person in the PC.

Carl and Dan will continue the conversation on their blogs and in the training and certification programs they conduct. Let the learning continue.

*I heard a talk this morning at my client’s site by one of their staff on the subject of wikis, who beautifully made the distinction between this “common law” and the “Roman law,” which is to “Prohibit anything you do not specifically permit.”