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BEA White Paper A Barometer of Web 2.0 Social Computing in Europe

Question 1:

What is the main reason for senior management in Europe not investing

in Web 2.0 tools for the enterprise?

European organizations are failing to invest in Web 2.0 technologies owing to a lack of understanding of the

business benefits among senior management. The majority of organizations (57 percent) cite this as the

reason for not investing in the technologies. This lack of knowledge of the business benefits points to the

need for education and communications surrounding the benefits.

Web 2.0 and social computing in the Enterprise empower greater end-user participation in the workplace while

maintaining strong governance and control for IT. The emergence of Web 2.0 technologies in the enterprise

signals the increased importance of collaboration and social software to improve knowledge worker productivity

and user-driven innovation.

Other reasons given for not deploying Web 2.0 surround concerns over how to regulate the content (cited by

23 percent of European organizations) and concerns regarding security (21 percent). Typically, perimeter

security, and audit and usage tracking applications are orphaned or built and maintained outside IT s domain,

creating security risks. The rise of wikis, blogs, and Web 2.0-style mashup applications has increased this

challenge.

Figure 1: What do you consider to be the main reason why senior management are not

investing in web 2.0 tools for the enterprise?

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Lack of understanding of business benefits

Concerns over how to regulate the content

Concerns over security issues