It's a notion that people have always found easy to grasp: that information technology can greatly expand our powers for communication, collaboration, and knowledge sharing and, by extension, our capacity for discovery and innovation.

Since 1961, when MIT demonstrated the world's first time-sharing system, this realization has driven the development and adoption of collaborative technologies. Today, at the end of the "Web 1.0 era," e-mail and websites are universally used by enterprises. Web conferencing, instant messaging, and shared workspaces are widely available either as technology solutions or online services. And the next great wave of collaboration technology is finding its way into the enterprise, continuing the process of transforming how people work together.

Variously dubbed as Web 2.0, Enterprise 2.0, and social media, this new wave brings together Web technologies that have been around for several years with collaborative approaches that were pioneered by the open source software movement, fueled by the ubiquitous connectivity of the Internet, and popularized through venues such as Wikipedia. In this model, self-governing communities—consisting of anywhere from a few people to hundreds or thousands—contribute freely to the creation and refinement of content.

Survey says: Who's taking the plunge?

A new study offers insight into how widely 2.0 technologies are being used and how executives judge their effectiveness as collaboration tools. "How American Companies Use Social Media" is based on a survey conducted jointly by the Gilbane Group and the Center for Marketing at the University of Massachusetts/Dartmouth on behalf of multiple clients including EMC. It captures the views of senior marketing executives at nearly 300 companies-all having at least 250 employees and $25 million in annual revenue.

Today's 2.0 users: The few, the happy, the committed

"Compared with the high penetration rates for Web 1.0 technologies, adoption of social media is still at a low level," says the study's coauthor, Geoffrey Bock, lead analyst for collaboration at the Gilbane Group and principal of Bock & Company. "Out of the seven Web 2.0 technologies covered, only three have adoption rates above 10 percent, and only one—podcasting—exceeds 20 percent. But I think we're close to the inflection point where adoption will accelerate. Our respondents rated some of these new technologies as being very effective. As the word spreads, many teams are going to start experimenting." Furthermore, the strength of commitment is reflected in plans to significantly increase investment in these technologies in the near future.

Early adopters: The open, the flexible, the agile

Dr. Nora Ganim Barnes, coauthor of the study and director of the Center for Marketing Research, says the survey adds nuances to the perception that open, flexible organizations are the most likely to be early adopters of social media. Using blogs as an example, she says, "Our past research found that nearly one-third of institutions and nonprofits use blogs compared with only 8-9 percent of the Fortune 500 and 10 percent of companies in the new study. However, if you break down the new data by industry, you get a richer picture." For example, 24 percent of companies in telecommunications and 21 percent of those in the software industry reported using blogs whereas none of the companies in the chemical, manufacturing, or engineering fields did. "Historically, these latter industries tend to be closed and slow-moving so it's not surprising that adoption lags behind," she says.

Collaboration R us

In many cases, enterprise demand for collaborative technologies is being driven by workers' online experiences with consumer websites and services. Today's knowledge workers are not only accustomed to viewing or reading content, but also creating, editing, and rating it. They're readers and writers of blogs and contributors to Wikipedia and other online shared spaces, and they're eager to bring similar technologies into their workplaces.

Adoption of these new technologies is often "a bottom-up, grassroots activity," says Bock. "People are trying to figure out better ways to work together and share information around the task rather than just sending e-mail," he says. "Teams that have a business problem to solve are looking to go online and solve that problem without waiting for IT to come up with the solution. The fact that Web 2.0 technologies are inexpensive, easy to deploy, and easy to use encourages exploration because people are no longer reliant on the IT organization. At the same time, people who are responsible for organizational processes and designs are looking at the long term and trying to figure out how to leverage their enterprise infrastructure and IT investments."

Not so fast: The potential downside of Web 2.0

Many of the basic attributes of Web 2.0 technology have a good news/bad news aspect to them. Here are two issues to consider.

User productivity

Adding new layers of collaboration competes for workers' time with phone calls, e-mail messages, and instant messages (IM), creating "one more thing" users have to learn and one more place they have to visit regularly. While this may not be the $588 billion productivity problem claimed by analysts Jonathan B. Spira and David M. Goldes of Basex—a research firm focusing on the knowledge economy—productivity losses resulting from communication overload is nonetheless a serious concern.

Security, compliance, and governance

The ability to share information across and outside corporate boundaries increases the risk that users will inadvertently expose sensitive information. Says Geoffrey Bock, "The problem from a corporate view is that information is uncontrolled, unmanaged, and unprotected. Web 2.0 needs to address issues around security, compliance, governance, and information lifecycle management."

Pfizerpedia: Tales of a one-hour wiki

Chris Bouton knows something about collaboration, having seen its power firsthand.

A team leader specializing in computational biology at Pfizer's Research Technology Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Bouton was interested in exploring the use of wiki technology to enable knowledge sharing. So one day in early 2006, he spent an hour downloading free, open source Mediawiki software, installing it on a spare server that he put under his desk, and setting up an internal website that he dubbed Pfizerpedia. His goal was to create a scientific encyclopedia for Pfizer's internal research and development (R&D) community, with articles being developed collaboratively by community members.

An urgent need in search of a compelling solution

The Pfizer community, it turned out, had different priorities, which were reflected in the content users started posting and the searches they were conducting. "People were using the wiki to advertise their projects, and they were using search to find out about other work at Pfizer," says Bouton. "In hindsight, that makes sense. In a company this large, researchers face crucial questions: How do you prevent redundancy in research efforts and funding? How do you know what else is going on in your field? How do you share your work with others?"

Within four months, as thousands of users contributed content, the site grew virally and morphed into something far more powerful than an encyclopedia. It became a user-generated, centralized index of all things R&D across Pfizer's worldwide organization including people, projects, events, blogs, and discussion groups. Integration with the enterprise directory and other data sources greatly enriched "people finding." With a simple search, users could quickly locate colleagues doing relevant work—and not only find their contact information, but also recent projects, publications, and seminars. And search they did, with an average of 12,000 unique visitors now using the site each month.

Connecting people and ideas

Though hard to measure, the impact was clear. "I hear stories all the time," says Bouton. "Researchers come up to me and say, 'I did a search and I found someone doing related work, and we've started a new project together.'" Connecting people in that way sparks innovation and speeds the pharmaceutical development process, thereby helping maximize Pfizer's return on R&D.

Beyond functioning as a mega index, Pfizerpedia also provides a platform for creating documentation. Teams use the wiki to develop user manuals for computational software and host discussion threads to identify and fix software bugs. "There are many aspects of wikis that enable knowledge sharing and knowledge building," says Bouton. "Pfizerpedia has basically become a repository for organizational memory."

Celebrating 10 years of Web-based collaboration at Wharton

At the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, a collaborative environment called webCafé has been an integral part of students' experiences since 1998.

"Fostering collaboration is a key challenge for today's managers," says Rob Ditto, project leader for Wharton Computing. "So it's important that they learn to be comfortable using collaborative tools and approaches." As many as 10,000 students and faculty are active users of webCafé, and more than 2,300 shared work spaces have been set up, both for academic courses and student groups. Ditto explains, "Instructors can post their class materials so students can access them at any time. Document sharing, revision tracking, and group editing allow teams to develop content collaboratively. With 'virtual office hours,' students can ask questions online and have the whole class view the instructor's answer, which is a huge time saver for everyone."