Despite Hype, Enterprise Workers Cling to Voice, Email

It appears that many enterprise 2.0 collaboration tools are struggling to be adopted, at least n Europe, says Stewart Baines, on the Orange Business blog. He notes recent research by Forrester Research indicating social networks, blogs, wikis and virtual worlds are being shunned by workers as they continue to communicate by phone or email.

The survey of 3,000 European knowledge workers found that, while 99 percent of workers collaborate with others and 81 percent work with two or more people in different time zones or regions, current tools do not meet their needs.

Security and control of information once it has been distributed seem to be clear barriers. But it might be more than that. Respondents seem to think collaboration tools simply are not engaging enough. About 44 percent of respondents say they still are looking for more engaging ways to collaborate.

About half of information security professional recently polled by Webroot say they intend to shelve plans for collaboration as a result of security concerns.

The Webroot survey found just 25 percent of security professionals are prepared to move ahead in spite of security concerns and only 15 percent have already resolved their security issues. The remaining 10 percent have no plans for collaborative working.

At least to some extent, Web-based collaboration tools appear still to be at some stage of supplier hype rather than end user demand, complicated by unresolved security and governance issues, at least in European enterprises.