Business research methods and applications

Business Research

Many research firms consider social networking to be the next major catalyst for productivity in enterprises, yet to date its impact has been relegated to customer service and interdepartmental collaboration. A study designed to interview enterprises in both the United Kingdom and the United States on their perceived need for social networking produced fascinating results of projected adoption rates by nation (Jones, 2008). Surprisingly the more conservative UK business community, interviewed in a stratified random sample, generated a higher percentage of early adoption than the U.S. Across the entire sample of 111 companies interviewed, 84% of companies said they understand and also plan for using the collaborative aspects of social networking for increasing their internal productivity, in addition to augmenting their customer-facing strategies.

Analysis of Research Methodology and Results

The basis of this specific study is based on the business demographic of organizations which have over 2,000 employees and have multiple locations they operate out of. The industries that these organizations were selected from for the sample are distributed between manufacturing and service sectors. Investments in Information Technologies (it) is often over $1M per year in both services and software, which indicates these organizations have processes and procedures in place for evaluating and purchasing new software. In addition, the survey itself concentrates on the acceptance of the enterprise-level implementations of Web 2,0, often called Enterprise 2.0 (McAfee, 2006). The essence of Enterprise 2.0 is the integration of social networking applications; platforms and tools into the enterprise-wide applications organization rely on to run their daily operations. These include Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and pricing, service and program management applications. The survey attempts to ascertain the level of commitment to integration to these legacy systems by going after the spend rate for social networking and Enterprise 2.0 applications. The survey also attempts to define the Return on Investment from investing in social networking applications, and derives a figure of $1.9M by 2013, corroborating a figure from Forrester Research.

Conclusion