Serious Business – Web 2.0 Goes Corporate

Via FASTForward Blog comes a report from the Economist Intelligence Unit titled “Serious Business: Web 2.0 Goes Corporate” (registration required, but the report is free).

The report is based on a poll of 406 senior executives (globally) who were asked questions about the impact of Web 2.0 on their businesses.

Some key conclusions:

• 31% of companies think that use of the web as a platform for sharing and collaboration will affect all parts of their business
•  Almost four-fifths of executives surveyed see the sharing and collaboration aspects of Web 2.0 as an opportunity to increase their company’s revenue and/or margins
• 21% of companies also expect Web 2.0 tools to lower public relations, advertising and marketing costs, while 17% expect to reduce the costs of product and service innovation

It’s a very well put together survey with a comprehensive appendix where you can see more of the raw data as well.

They do mention briefly some of the challenges:

• 26% of survey respondents cite the competence level of their IT staff as the department’s weakest link
•  More than one-third . . . cite a lack of resources to invest in new technology

From my perspective, it’d be nice to see more attention to how to cost-effectively get started with Web 2.0 applications – through leverage of Open Source software and consulting firms like Optaros of course.