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Before the rise of today’s social media tools like blogs and wikis, there already existed a variety of computer network supported communication and collaboration technologies – with which many organizations were already quite experienced. E-mail is the best example. As a technology, e-mail predates both the modern Internet and the WWW. It has become indispensable in organizations today – some might argue too much so. Regardless of how much you might regret the hold on your life that your inbox now has over you, it is hard to dispute that E-mail has transformed how many organizations work and communicate.
Along with e-mail, electronic bulletin boards (aka forums or threaded discussion groups) and instant messenger (chat) also have long and established histories. But are these tools anywhere near as ubiquitous within the enterprise as email? Our research shows that adoption is decidedly – and perhaps surprisingly – mixed:
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Only 20% of respondents say that their organizations have consistently adopted bulletin boards or discussion groups as a collaboration tool within the enterprise. Chat or “instant messenger” tools are consistently in use within the organizations of only 33% of those surveyed. In both cases more than half of respondents reported little or no adoption of these tools. Given such factors as the changing workforce demographics in organizations or the rising cost of fuel, today’s workplace is increasingly virtual in nature. Viewed from that perspective, the relative lack of adoption for chat tools, in particular, is surprising, at least on first glance. As we continue to review the survey results, we will delve into these numbers further to determine what factors drive usage of these tools, or if certain types of organizations are more apt to use them than others. In the meantime, I would love to hear your thoughts on the question. Is your organization using discussion groups or IM as a collaboration tool? If yes, how so? If not, why not? Thanks in advance.
-David
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| Note: We recently conducted a survey covering the ways in which organizations are meeting the on-demand learning needs of their employees. Approximately 1000 respondents participated, representing a very wide cross section of organizations in both the public and private sectors and with both North American and global footprints. We are just beginning to formally examine the data, but preliminary analysis has already uncovered a few intriguing items. We will share a few of these highlights as the research continues. Today, we look at corporate use of first generation computer supported collaboration tools. |
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