While marketing departments and other lines of business may have forged the earliest Web 2.0 deployments in many companies, IT departments increasingly are taking a leadership role in the acquisition and management of these technologies, according to a report released Thursday.
A survey by Forrester Research of more than 260 IT professionals shows that 63% expect Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and RSS feeds to have a moderate or substantial impact on their business in the next three years.
"I am seeing more and more IT departments lead the Web 2.0 discussions," said G. Oliver Young, the Forrester analyst who wrote the report. "I am having fewer and fewer discussions with lines of business saying, 'We need help to get around our IT department.'"
Forrester said its previous predictions -- that IT shops would grow comfortable with Web 2.0 tools, acknowledge that they meet enterprise requirements and see the support of such technologies as a way to bolster their relevance -- are coming true.
"It is a growing familiarity of the tools up and down the organization," Young said. "Just a couple of years ago a lot of these tools were very foreign. IT departments and professionals are increasingly using these tools for their own use."
The growing acceptance of Web 2.0 tools also is attributable to a shifting mentality among IT shops that their success depends on the value they provide to the business, he added. "These are fundamentally user-oriented tools, and they provide a lot of value to the business, often at very low cost."
The study did find that the understanding of Web 2.0 tools is uneven; It is often the junior staffers who are most aware of the tools and their uses, the report said. CIOs and other senior IT managers are more likely to be skeptical.
The survey also found that IT departments increasingly hold the purse strings when it comes to Web 2.0 projects - 80% of those surveyed said IT is funding Web 2.0 projects. In other cases, the marketing or corporate communications departments shelled out money for the tools.
Forrester believes that number is likely overstated due to IT's inability to account for line-of-business projects under its radar, the report said. Forrester estimated that at least 60% of companies have at least a part of their Web 2.0 deployments funded by the IT department.
Still, IT has some concerns about Web 2.0 tools; almost a third, or 31%, of those surveyed said they are very concerned about the risks of employee-driven, unsanctioned use of Web 2.0 tools. Forty-eight percent are somewhat concerned, and just 2% said they're completely unconcerned.
Forrester also found that 22% of the firms surveyed said that they have not measured the business value of Web 2.0 technologies, while 41% said they set value using traditional measurements such as ROI and 27% measured their return through employee productivity surveys.
"The ROI discussion is always a prickly one," Young noted. "It is very difficult to sit down and create that traditional ROI measurement where you can talk dollars and cents. The benefits are softer benefits..., a lot of productivity benefits spread over a lot of different resources."
According to the report, IT professionals found the most business value from discussion forms (70% said they got substantial or moderate business value), wikis (67% noted they got moderate or substantial business value) and podcasts (62% said they were getting moderate or substantial business value).
"These are the tools that are most well understood and the ones where the people implementing them and the people using them are starting to get a very good idea of how to use them properly," Young said.
Meanwhile, users reported the least amount of business value from mashups (41% reported substantial or moderate business value) and social bookmarking or tagging (42% noted moderate or substantial business value).
"[Mashups] are just not well understood at this point," according to Oliver. "They hold a lot of promise [but] there are few companies
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