Tuesday, 25 September 2007

Web 2.0 Social Computing Dresses Up For Business: Forrester

Corporate IT departments have seen better value from Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace and should continue to adopt more of those applications at their own pace, says a new report by Forrester Research....

Corporate IT departments have seen better value from Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace and should continue to adopt more of those applications at their own pace, says a new report by Forrester Research.

The report also said that high risks abound in the unsanctioned use of consumer, web-based applications, thus pressurising the IT managers to get into the deep to find out where sensitive corporate data could be exposed.

"Of the rogue usage going on, it's often difficult to see which poses privacy or security concerns," says Rob Koplowitz, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report.

About 15 per cent of the IT decision-makers surveyed at firms with 500 or more employees say their workers have used technologies like blogs and wikis for business purposes.

On average, about 27 per cent of those companies have already made formal enterprise investments in all three of those technologies and another 16 per cent have at least considered it. About 89 per cent saw limited to substantial value from the use of blogs, RSS and wikis.

Koplowitz says the numbers reported for rogue usage was actually low.

Koplowitz said, "It could be a lot higher because unsanctioned use is, by definition, under the radar. The best an IT manager can do is have some anecdotal evidence and then work from there."