In this paper, the authors present results from a study on the usage rate of 2.0 tools and technologies among Spanish enterprises. The main objective of the study is to analyze, from the perceptions of executives, the influence of social software tools on a set of business processes. This analysis has been made using two graphic tools: the “2.0 Success Matrix” and the “Tool’s Footprint”. Both the review of literature and the empirical work have lead to important findings and conclusions.
TopInformation and Communications Technologies (ICT) have been introduced in the past in organizations, usually in the form of information systems designed specifically for each business or company. IS have gradually acquired greater complexity, evolving until they have become completely integrated in business processes. Thus, ICT have become a key element that runs parallel to cross-business processes within the organization (Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 1997; McAfee, 2002).
While studies have demonstrated an improvement of the parameters associated with IT investment, some articles show that new IT investments have a very limited impact on company profits, compared to the investment made (Brynjolfsson & Hitt, 1996). This fact, according to the authors, may be due to having reached an optimal point in IT investment, so an increase in investment does not cause a significant change in the observed parameters, specially the profits of the company.
Because persisting in investing on such traditional systems does not seem to cause the expected return, future efforts in business ICT should be focused on other areas. One of these new fields of development is social software. After having proved a great potential because of their degree of general acceptance, companies have now begun to glimpse this potential.
The term social software comprises a group of technologies, tools and services. For the present study the following tools were selected due to their special significance and their impact on the processes selected (Hasan & Pfaff, 2006; Johnston, 2007; Millen, Feinberg, & Kerr, 2006; Bätchtle, 2006; Juch & Stobbe, 2005; Celaya, 2000): (1) Employee and Corporate Blogs, (2) Wikis; (3) Content Syndication Systems; (4) Social Networking and Virtual Communities; (5) Semantic Labeling Systems; (6) Recommendation Systems and Social Filtering; (7) Microblogging systems.