As communicated in a previous blog post, we recently had the opportunity to present the main results of our exploratory survey on the deployment of Enterprise 2.0 concepts & tools in Belgium at the Digital Innovators Tour.
The full presentation has already been made public so let’s just discuss here the main conclusions. They can be structured around three questions we will approach step by step in the coming weeks:
- What’s the state of development of Enterprise 2.0 projects in Belgium? And do they have a clear future?
- Do contemporary companies adopt some expected organizational characteristics of a typical Enterprise 2.0 firm – and to what extent?
- Does the success of Enterprise 2.0 projects depend on a company’s organizational profile… and if well, on which dimensions of this profile?
Present and future of Enterprise 2.0 projects in Belgium
85 % of the respondents (mainly top & middle management, IT and marketing representatives) actually launched at least one Enterprise 2.0 project within their company. Amongst them, 63 % are quite (49 %) to very (14 %) satisfied about it.
I would say this is a quite enthusiastic though a bit delusional result. After all, still 15 % of the respondents have never been concerned at all by any Enterprise 2.0 project, whatever it was about deploying an online collaboration platform, launching a blog or a wiki or even starting to develop their online communication through e.g. public social networks or microblogs. And if 63 % are satisfied, what about the other 37 %?
Actually, only 12 % of them claim to be quite dissatisfied about their launched projects, which represents a small part of the population. More intriguing, 25% just do not have a clear opinion on that (“I don’t know”)! I think this illustrates the persistent difficulty for companies to make a proper evaluation of such qualitative projects, mainly because they lack the appropriate tools, methods and – maybe also – mindset to do so (1).
By the way, when being asked about the budget they allocated to their projects, 2/3 either just do not know or say they did not have a specific budget for that. Are such projects still a pure intrapreneurship issue?! Or does it just show us that they are not always managed as « real » projects (that is with clear strategic guidelines, budget, deadlines, ad hoc project management methodologies etc.)?
Nearly 70 % of those who invested at least some K€ consider about half of it was spent in change management (vs. purchase of licenses etc.). This result could be considered as a « good news » for a consulting company like ours :-), but more seriously it illustrates the fact that implementing tools – even if of a good quality – is just not enough to turn an Enterprise 2.0 project into a real business trigger (in terms of productivity, efficiency, innovation or employee and/or customer satisfaction) (2).
Another interesting result: launching an Enterprise 2.0 project could be seen as the best incentive to deploy other ones (3). Hereunder table shows us indeed that people who already started a project are more inclined to foresee new projects in the coming year than those who did not start any project yet. This is particularly true for collaborative spaces (“à la SharePoint”) and public social networks, but also for enterprise networking platforms, microblogs and – to a smaller extent – more “traditional” tools like blogs and wikis.
But in the same time, we also note that those respondents more than the experienced ones consider they will have a budget for that, whatever the kind of project it is about. Public social networks and collaborative spaces are then the most probable budgetable projects.
In conclusion, we think these results give a quite good idea of how Enterprise 2.0 tools are making their way in contemporary Belgian organizations (in the private as well as in the public sector), although we should be honest and recognize our respondents may be quite “Enterprise 2.0 minded” (4).
Many of them (but not all) already started a project and are satisfied about it – which is good news, but still some issues deserve to be addressed deeper like the evaluation of such projects, their anchor in the line of business of the company and the strategic vision they rely on.
(1) This single point (measuring Enterprise 2.0 projects both qualitatively and quantitatively) would deserve a specific blog post as we have thoughts about that for some time.
(2) This last point will be even clearer when we’ll share our thoughts on the importance of organizational readiness to reach success (to be followed in our next blog post!).
(3) We should have a closer (qualitative) look at these results to evaluate if this is due to an existing mid- or long-term corporate strategy or just an emerging incentive based on the interest gained from previous projects.
(4) As illustrated by the roles of the respondents within their organization, generally more concerned with digital projects (IT, marketing, management…). For example, only 1,3 % of them were HR representatives.
