A survey by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Adobe

How do European knowledge workers collaborate in times of Web2.0?

The Forrester survey demonstrates that most of the kowledge workers still prefer personal meetings and telephone calls in their working habits, if it has to be in written form they tend to send out e-mails with elaborate attachments (far by 90%). As if wikis, blogs, social networks and other collaboration tools had not been invented at all (use less than 5%)! At the same time they feel not satisfied about the efficiency of their work and are well aware of optimizing potential.

Privately, the use of web2.0 collaboration tools is widespread not only among geeks, so why not use them in business surroundings?

One reason seems to be that enterprises and their IT departments to not deploy such tools too eagerly for their staff. That again gives „early adopters“ the idea to look for useful tools on their own. While this „technological populism“ may bring short time advantages for a single person it certainly leads to high risks of uncontrollable diversity of tools and security risks in compliance and governance issues for a whole organisation.

All in all the survey reaffirms my opinion that the idea of web tech cooperation is an upcoming and important topic in the nearest future, provided that one can offer professional solutions carefully designed and professionally implemented. My experience with Drupal and working in virtual teams can be thoroughly quoted as best practices.