Web 2.0 in Businesses

Published by Arjun Thomas | January 7, 2009

In continuing with the Web 2.0 theme I thought i would share a rather interesting survey done by The McKinsey Quarterly a while ago. This was done to identify if and how businesses use Web 2.0 technologies within their organization.

This report gives a very interesting insight into how Web 2.0 technologies are perceived by organizations. There are a couple of points jotted down below, feel free to go through the entire report.

I was pleasantly surprised to note that a large percentage of companies have started taking a serious look at Web 2.0 technology implementations within their ranks. This perhaps is driven by the fact that user-driven online services like MySpace, Wikipedia and YouTube are gaining popularity.

However most of the companies that have invested in Web 2.0 technologies have stayed away from popular trends like blogs, instead they’ve placed greater emphasis on technologies that enable automation and networking. A lot has changed since this report came out and there are a number of companies out there that have started taking a serious look at blogs to talk to both clients as well as their employees.

Over 50% of the executives surveyed said they were pleased with the results of their investments, the early movers however were much more satisfied than those that started out later. The general feel was that a majority of the respondents wished they had started this a lot earlier. Of all the Web 2.0 technologies, Web services seemed to be the most popular with collective intelligence and peer-to-peer networking coming in a close second.

A survey by industry showed that Retail and Hi-tech leads the pack when it comes for future plan in Web 2.0 investments. In the Region category, India leads the pack with an 80% of respondents stating that they have plans to implement web 2.0 technologies over the next year.

How they use them

Another interesting observation was the end use for these technologies. 70% of the respondents said they use it for interfacing with customers, 51% use it to interface with suppliers and partners and 75% for managing collaboration internally.

Again, the most popular Web 2.0 technology being used by corporate today seems to be Web-services.

From a purely Knowledge Management perspective, the most popular Web 2.0 Technologies seem to be Collective intelligence (36%), Peer to peer networking (65%), Social networking (60%) and Mash-ups (70%).

The most successful of these implementations were performed at the grass roots level. The advantage of this approach was that most of these projects were taken up by their natural owners within the organization.

The value of these technologies are already having an impact on business, customers are now able to have dialogues with the companies.

Read the full survey here
How businesses are using Web 2.0: A McKinsey Global Survey
(free registration required)

For those of you reading this it would be very interesting to know how Web 2.0 technologies have been adopted within your organization.

• What was the goal behind adopting the technology?
• How has the organization benefited from it?
• How have you benefited from it?
• Where there ways you think this could have been adopted in a better manner?

If you have come across an interesting survey like the one mentioned above do leave a comment.

Related posts:

1. The Value of the Project Management Office - a Study
2. What is Web 2.0?
3. Knowledge Enterprises
4. Collaboration Management
5. CMS adoption in Universities

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