Web 2.0 applications have been part of daily life in private Internet use for some time now. Corporations on the other hand have so far resisted the introduction of social networks, wikis, blogs & co. But now they seem to have woken up to the fact that they can increase efficiency significantly through ‘Enterprise 2.0’. The catalyst of this development is the phenomenon ‘consumerization’, along with innovative and mobile applications.

Who can still imagine a life without web 2.0? Unknown terms are looked up in Wikipedia, old friends found in Facebook, and news on nearly any subject read about in blogs. This intense private use makes it even more amazing that only half of all German companies use web 2.0 applications or social software in their business environment too¹. But the time does now seem to be ripe. Companies are planning manifold increases in their expenditure on social software in the next five years. Whereas the investments in 2008 will be around 760 million US Dollars, Forrester Research analysts are forecasting strong growth in worldwide expenditure, to reach 4.6 billion US Dollars by 2013. Social networks, wikis, blogs and RSS (Really Simple Syndication) are at the top of the corporate agenda, whereby RSS is an application which enables the personalized aggrega­tion of information².

Consumerization is driving web 2.0 into corporate IT

The companies’ slow reaction indicates that it takes a while for knowledge about the advantages of social software to reach the top floor. This is no big surprise, social software initiatives in companies often have a ‘grass roots’ character. They are driven ‘bottom-up’ by the employees. Applications such as Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter have long proved useful in the private arena. So why shouldn’t similar applications be used at the workplace too? Corporate IT is presently finding out about an innovation from the private sector. This phenomenon is known as ‘consumerization’. It describes the reversal of the normal flow of innovation development from the corporation to the con­sumer – concerning software technology in the case of web 2.0. Gartner’s analysts say that this phenomenon is unavoidable, and that it will be the key influence on IT over the next ten years³. IT departments should therefore be paying more attention to the habits and needs of their employees alongside the requirements of the market. In the case of social software the process of consumerization has taken around five years. The English language version of Wikipedia grew beyond 100.000 articles in the year 2003, and then started to enjoy the attention that it has now, the social networking platform openBC (now Xing) was also founded in 2003. But only now, in 2008, are the decision makers in companies beginning to wake up to the need to invest. 
Next page