This report looks at responses to two questions from Gartner's 2010 workplace survey related to social software and collaboration technology adoption and business value expectations. Conventional collaboration technologies, and in particular e-mail, lead in terms of adoption and perceptions of importance; but the importance of social networking and the deployment of wikis is expected to increase through to 2012.

• Conventional communication technologies led by e-mail are widely adopted.

• Wikis are most widely deployed among newer social technology.

• Social networking is deployed by some, rejected by a few, and actively investigated by most.

• Benchmark your current deployments against the results of the survey to uncover any noticeable inconsistencies.

• Look at how e-mail is used in your organization to uncover activities that could benefit from social software capabilities that add persistence, structure, and transparency.

• Use the survey results as additional input to your future deployment plans of collaboration and social software deployments.

An important consideration for technology buyers and business executives looking to take advantage of rapidly evolving social software and collaboration technologies are the successes and failures of their peers. In our 2010 workplace survey, we surveyed 416 U.S.-based IT professionals responsible for evaluating or recommending workplace and social software products and services, or setting budgets and strategies for those products and services.

In one of the survey questions we asked respondents to identify their current usage for different technologies ranging from e-mail to social tagging and bookmarking. More specifically, we asked 'In what phase do you consider your enterprise's current technology adoption to be for each of the following?' and respondents had to select from one of the following options:

• Deployment complete

• Currently in production (deployment under way)

• Pilots beyond the IT organization

• Investigating within IT

• Actively rejected

• Not investigated

• Don't know

The results shown in Figure 1 confirm that conventional technologies such as e-mail are well established in most organizations. E-mail is ubiquitous with complete deployments at the organizations of 94% of the respondents; while group calendars or meeting scheduling, Web conferencing, instant messaging and team workspaces are in full deployment or are being deployed at more than 50% of the organizations surveyed. Wikis are also adopted quite widely with more than a fifth of the respondents reporting complete deployments and almost just as many again with deployments under way. The wiki is the most readily adopted newer social software technology with full or production deployments at more than 40% of the organizations surveyed. Desktop video conferencing, blogs and Web feeds are beginning to make inroads in many organizations with about a third of them reporting these technologies as either in full or production deployments. Expertise location, social networking tools, as well as social tagging and bookmarking are less widely deployed with less than 10% of the organizations surveyed reporting full deployments.

It also noteworthy that some of these technologies have been considered by some of the respondents but were rejected. Instant messaging, Web feeds, blogs, social networking, and social tagging and bookmarking had the highest rejection rates of between 5% to 7% of respondents. Although we did not ask for the reasons for the rejection we believe that this is due to a variety of factors such as time wasting, compliance concerns and security risks (particularly for instant messaging). Other reasons include unauthorized publishing (particularly for blogs), as well as a general inability to articulate clear business benefits or uncertainty that any benefits that could be identified would actually materialize in practice (especially for social networking and social tagging and bookmarking). Most organizations are still struggling with the finding the right balance between risk and value when introducing such technologies in their organizations. This is very visible in the case of social networking tools below which has both the highest rejection rate at 7% but also has the highest degree of attention from IT organizations, with 30% of them investigating them within IT.

The survey responses shown in Figure 1 were consistent across organizations of different sizes as well as across vertical industries, with only minor variations.

In another question, we asked about the perceived business value from these technologies and how they expected it to change in the next two years, through to 2012. More specifically, for each of several technologies we asked the respondents the following two questions:

1. Using a scale from 1 to 7, rate the importance of each of the following products and services in terms of its business value to your enterprise (where 1 is Not important at all, 4 is Neutral, and 7 is Extremely important).

2. Using a scale from 1 to 7, to what extent do you expect business value to change for each of the following products and services? (where 1 is Decrease significantly over next two years, 4 is No change over next two years, and 7 is Increase significantly over next two years).

The responses are shown in Figures 2 and 3.

E-mail is rated most highly in terms of its current importance compared to all other technologies (see Figure 2). However, it is also the one which expected to change the least in terms of importance (see Figure 3). Several technologies which are rated close to "neutral" in terms of their current importance in Figure 2 (such as blogs, Web feeds, social tagging and bookmarking, wikis and social networking tools), are expected to increase in importance (albeit modestly) during the next two years, as shown in Figure 3. Team workspaces are already high in terms of their importance today but their importance is expected to increase more than all the rest. This is consistent with the results shown in Figure 1, where team workspaces are piloted or investigated in a significant proportion of organizations (36%) while having very low rates of rejection or apathy (2% rejected, 7% not investigated). We expect shared workspaces to approach near ubiquity with 60% to 70% of organizations having full or production deployments by 2012. Of newer technologies, social networking tools is the one category whose importance is expected to increase the most. Other technologies such as Web conferencing, instant messaging, desktop videoconferencing and social tagging and bookmarking are also expected to grow in significance.

It is clear from these responses on perceptions of business value that e-mail is by far the most important daily communication and collaboration technology. Although its significance is not expected to decline during the next two years, other forms of communication, collaboration and social interaction are growing, both in adoption and business importance.