Corporate use of social technologies is mainstream, though the pace of adoption has slowed. But companies can still take advantage of the untapped potential these tools have to transform their organizations and create significant value.
A vast majority of respondents continue to cite business benefits,2 and the mix of enterprises where executives report higher-than-average benefits is consistent with last year. One-fifth of companies qualify as fully networked organizations (Exhibit 2), those reaping the highest improvements in benefits from their technology use with internal and external stakeholders,3 while the share seeing outsize benefits from internal company use (12 percent) remains small.4 Again, given the large amount of value that social technologies could create through internal use, there is significant room here for companies to grow.
I've followed this survey since its inception in 2008 and I'VE always found it a great tool to convince executives of the business benefits - measurable - that social and collaboration bring to enterprises (termed enterprise 2.0).
But now this one shows a slow down in the rate of adoption, which does not bode well for those yet in the undecided camp. Unfortunately, not networking your employees means you do not benefits from reduction in travel cost, reductions in communication costs, faster product development time-to-market and increased access to knowledge (to name only the most important benefits).
More dangerous, the other half - your competitors - will benefit from them and thus you'll face increased competition for which you'll be ill equipped to handle.
See also: