AIIM is officially introducing its new Collaboration/Enterprise 2.0 Industry Watch on Tuesday, June 30, 2009. AIIM is the community that provides education, research, and best practices to help organizations find, control, and optimize their information. I was able to review an advance copy of the study this past weekend.

The survey was taken by 789 individual members of the AIIM community between May 11th, 2009 and May 26th, 2009. The respondents represented over 400 organizations.

Enterprise 2.0 was a term coined by Andrew McAfee, a Harvard Business School professor in the spring of 2006. He saw the potential to apply to business the concepts of Web 2.0 tools, which until recently have been used primarily by teens and college students to build social networks. As “Web 2.0 for business”, Enterprise 2.0 seems to offer new ways for a distributed team of an organizations employees, its partners and customers to utilize social networking for knowledge sharing and deploying expertise rapidly.

AIIM first reported on Enterprise 2.0 at the beginning of 2008, and the survey shows that use of social media outside of work continues to grow, with many of the younger generation workers wanting similar tools in the workplace.

One area that I found particularly interesting was around the area of collaboration, and in particular the sharing of project documents. The respondents were asked to choose the top three document collaboration tools most used by your team or within your business unit. The top choice was “emailed suggestions and changes” at over 80% of the respondents. This is probably one of the reasons that email is the first data store that opposing counsel requests during discovery because it’s a cornucopia of multiple copies, mismatched versions and conflicting comments. It’s also not surprising that email is one of the primary drivers when clients ask for assistance in getting their content under control.

A summary of some of the key facts from the survey include:

• Corporate understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is and how it could help the business has doubled in the last year with only 17% still having no idea what it is.
• Over half of organizations consider Enterprise 2.0 to be “important” or “very important” to their business goals and success.
• Only 25% are actually doing anything about it, but this is up from 13% in 2008.
• Knowledge-sharing, collaboration and responsiveness are considered the biggest drivers.
• Lack of understanding, corporate culture and cost are the biggest impediments.
• 27% of people aged 18-30 consider Twitter is an important rapid-feedback tool for business. Only 7% of those over 45 agree.
• 47% of 18-30s and 31% of over 45’s expect to use the same type of networking tools with business colleagues as with friends and family.
• 40% feel it is important to have Enterprise 2.0 facilities within their ECM suite, with SharePoint TeamSites as the most likely collaboration platform.
• Planned spending on Enterprise 2.0 projects in the next 12 months is up in all product areas.

Look for the results of the survey on AIIM’s web site at this link.