Enterprise Web 2.0: The Challenge of Executive Sense-Making and Consensus

As the complexity of business ventures increase and the essential roles of IT-alignment processes and service coherency receive increasing attention, managerial exchange and coordination across the executive board become all the more pivotal. Enterprise Web 2.0 is particularly affording in this respect, as the deployment of the involved web-based applications and services in core build on the realization of overarching, holistic business conceptions; i.e., strategic consensus among chief executive (CEO) and chief IT (CIO) must be seen as core prerequisites for successful future corporate IT-development. Based on results from the Enterprise 2.0-Survey FIN08, administered to Finnish enterprise leaders, this paper reports on the contents and degrees of consensus between these two managerial populations regarding the 4 interest areas of familiarity and basic conception, evaluation and attitude, sense-making and deployment objective, as well as deployment manner. Generally we found CIOs and direct IT-managing officers to be more knowledgeable and experienced, as well as more ready to invest than CEOs and officers with mere decision-making competences. However at the same time, CIOs displayed also a higher degree of critical realism and caution about the prospects and enterprise Web 2.0-deployment.