A few posts ago I talked about Enterprise 2.0 Adoption where I reviewed a portion of a report that was released by the Enterprise 2.0 council.  Recently, the FULL report was released online for free which provides more insight into how companies are beginning to adopt and implement Enterprise 2.0.  You can find the full Enterprise 2.0 report for free here (thanks to the Enterprise 2.0 Council).  I highly recommend you read the full report but I want to focus on what I believe is the most important section which is where companies are allocating their dollars.  The two graphs below provide a budget breakdown of what Enterprise 2.0 budgets are and what those budgets are going towards.

enterprise 2.0 budgets enterprise 2.0 budget breakdown

Pay special attention to the fact that almost all Enterprise 2.0 budgets are under 3 million dollars (with a majority being under 1 million).  Notice that only 6% of the total Enterprise 2.0 budget is going towards developing a strategy.  Taking the numbers from above means that:

  • 41% of companies are spending $30,000 or LESS on their Enterprise 2.0 strategy
  • 23% of companies are spending between $30,000-$60,000 on their Enterprise 2.0 strategy
  • 16% of companies are spending between $60,000-$180,000 on their Enterprise 2.0 strategy
  • 13% of companies are spending between $180,000-$300,000 on their Enterprise 2.0 strategy
  • 8% of companies are spending upwards of $300,000 on their Enterprise 2.0 strategy

Strategy is tied for 6th place along with “ongoing technology management/maintenance” and ranks juts slightly higher than community management and training, why?  The strategy is going to be the backbone of the entire Enterprise 2.0 initiative and while the budgeting breakdown above doesn’t signal priority of spending (otherwise we would be in BIG trouble) it does raise the question of what companies are doing and expecting from a budget that is oftentimes under $60,000?  This is part of the reason why I asked the question, “Is Enterprise 2.0 a Crock?

I realize that we are still in the early adopter stages of social media, social business, enterprise 2.0, or whatever else you want to call it but I think we need to do a better job at allocating budgets towards Enterprise 2.0 shifts.  Why can companies justify hundreds of thousands of dollars on software and staffing but not on developing the strategies that support that?  Something doesn’t make sense here and I think we need to rethink how we are approaching this.

Think about that while you look at the graph below which is from Forrester and provides estimated interactive budgets for various companies during 2009.

forrester interactive budgets for 2009

Notice one key distinction, the Forrester budgeting specifies “social media” in the estimates but does not mention “enterprise 2.0” so I’m making the assumption that these are 2 separate things.  This means that companies have no problem spending between $200,000-$1.4 million on social media (which is external facing) but are not spending anywhere near that amount on Enterprise 2.0 (internal facing).

What we need to realize is that both internal and external social business efforts need to work in tandem to achieve the greatest results.  How can brands justify spending on building external communities when they are still struggling with building internal collaboration communities.

2010 is going to see drastic changes in the Enterprise 2.0 space both in terms of adoption and in how budgets are being allocated (or at least I hope it will see changes)

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