Infotech Lead America: Globally, businesses seem to be realizing that integrating collaboration into business processes can transform the way work is done in the enterprise. Majority of businesses are now using social networking technologies to improve business results.
According to a global survey conducted by Avanade, a global business technology solutions and managed services provider, most of the businesses that have adopted social collaboration tools have benefitted and plan to adopt more social tools in the future.
Approximately 77 percent of decision makers and 68 percent users report use enterprise social networking technologies. Eighty two percent of businesses that have already adopted social collaboration tools want to use more of them in the future.
Sixty six percent of IT decision-makers reported that social technologies make their jobs more enjoyable. 62 percent said it increases productivity and 57 percent reported that their work gets done faster when the use these technologies.
Twenty three percent of business and IT decision-makers are yet adopt social collaboration tools in the enterprise.
Avanade’s research also unveils some misconceptions related to social collaboration. 74 percent of those who have adopted social networking technologies in their company reported using consumer-oriented social technologies including Facebook for collaboration at twice the rate of Microsoft SharePoint -39 percent, four times more than IBM Open Connections – 17 percent and six times more than Salesforce Chatter – 12 percent.
Over the next year, decision-makers planning to adopt social technologies list Microsoft SharePoint (23 percent) and Salesforce Chatter (23 percent) as their preferred collaboration deployments. Facebook currently ranks No. 1 among social collaboration technologies in use today at 74 percent, but only 8 percent of decision maker respondents wanted to adopt it in the next year.
Avanade’s global survey on adoption of social collaboration technologies covered 4,000 end users and 1,000 business and IT decision-makers in 22 countries.
A similar study by French IT consulting and analysis group Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC), revealed that social collaboration has started to make significant inroads into the European corporate world. Around 60 percent of the companies surveyed in Germany, France and the UK stated that their companies have taken a first step to launch projects focusing on social collaboration.
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