EDIT: I've recovered and reposted this entry from Google's cache.

So, not long after I mention my general skepticism of CIO surveys, I am building yet another article around one... because other than anecdotes, what else do we have, eh?

This is a McKinsey Global survey examining the state of Web 2.0 in the enterprise, or what I think of as Enterprise 2.0: the deployment of tools conventionally associated with the Web 2.0 movement for business purposes.

The technologies that McKinsey identifies in this category are:

• Blogs


• RSS feeds


• Wikis


• Podcasts


• Social Networking


• Peer to Peer


• Web Services

...that last being somewhat ephemeral and seemingly encompassing quite a few techniques that were around long before Web 2.0. Not surprisingly, then, that was the category identified by most respondents as being in use in their enterprise. Mash-ups were at the bottom, reflecting either their novelty or a shared perplexity in enterprise IT shops about what exactly their applications might be.

While most Web 2.0 deployments were oriented internally, indicating a natural and perhaps bottom-up exploratory phase, an increasingly number of respondents indicated that the tools were soon to be oriented toward external-facing customers... showing a level of comfort which was not present even as recently as last year with the tools.

Use of the tools deployed internally varied greatly, with no great surprise reaching the most employees in companies which integrated their use directly into existing workflow. You have to wonder why the rest even bothered; the failure to adopt can hardly be laid wholly at the feet of the toolsets if cardinal rules of integration and business alignment aren't followed.

On the whole, I'm impressed at the level of adoption and degree of enthusiasm. If this sort of rapid integration of new technologies continues, then the slow acceptance rate of SOA, utility computing, and virtualization may all be expected to accelerate considerably in the near future. Of course, there is an ease of deployment with Web 2.0 tools which makes them easy to experiment with, an advantage some of the other new concepts don't enjoy, but I had expected more institutional resistance than this survey indicates.