Why organisations use Web 2.0

A critical review of:

Saldanha, T.J.V & Krishnan, M.S. (2012). Organizational adoption of Web 2.0 technologies: An empirical analysis, Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 22 (4), 301-333.

The purpose of Saldanha and Krishnan’s (2012) article is to determine what drives businesses to internally utilise Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and social bookmarking (ITmatters, 2011). The authors state that although previous studies have focused on the use of Web 2.0 technologies at the individual (employee) level, there has been no specific examination of the motivations behind why organisations adopt these technologies. As such, there is little empirical evidence concerning this subject (Boyles, 2011).

Saldanha and Krishnan (2012) use what is known as the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework to document their results, since this system has been used by other researchers to ‘examine the organizational adoption of Information Technology’.

Their hypotheses are as follows:

1. If organisations regard open standards as important they will be more likely to adopt Web 2.0. Open standards ‘facilitate interoperability and data exchange among different products or services and are intended for widespread adoption’ (ITU, 2005). Since Web 2.0 is able to connect to services already in place (McAfee 2006), businesses that are familiar with such open standards are more likely to make use of Web 2.0.


2. Larger businesses are more open to social technologies than smaller ones because they have more resources and greater scope for experimentation. As a result of their size, bigger organisations can find it difficult to generate communication and collaboration between employees without the social connections available through the use of Web 2.0.


3. If businesses employ knowledge processes and resources they can use Web 2.0 to disseminate and manage them more easily. Technologies such as blogs can be used to communicate and share knowledge, and wikis can act as a dynamic repository for storing, retrieving and building knowledge information.


4. The greater the amount of competition in the marketplace, the more Web 2.0 is needed. Competition has always driven organisations to come up with better and more efficient solutions to their business problems. By using Web 2.0 to boost communication and collaboration, businesses can use the results of such technologies to gain an edge over their competitors.

Saldanha and Krishnan (2012) use data collected from a survey (conducted by InformationWeek—an information technology publication for business and information technology managers) to see if their hypotheses are supported in real world organisations. Collecting survey data via sources such as magazines would appear to be a dubious way of obtaining it; however Saldanha and Krishnan (2012) are able to justify their use of this method. Considering that past surveys conducted in InformationWeek have been used successfully in other academic studies, such data is considered to be as accurate as that gathered from other secondary sources (Rai, Patnayakuni, & Patnayakuni, 1997). In addition, the responses to the survey came from 195 different firms, allowing for a wide information gathering area. The final data analysis supports the points set down in the author’s first three hypothesis.

Saldanha and Krishnan’s (2012) article deals with the reasons why businesses adopt Web 2.0 technologies, but because it is such a broad study it doesn’t look at specific types of organisations. This is not a flaw, since the scope of their study is more of an overview and does not focus on individual businesses. However, as information professionals it is important to examine Web 2.0 with regard to businesses such as libraries.

Since Web 2.0 services have become part of everyday life, libraries around the world have started to implement social media tools to promote their services, connect with users and share information on a local, national and international level (Slainte, 2012). Although Saldanha and Krishnan (2012) concentrate on the internal use of social technologies, it would be interesting to see if their hypotheses can be applied to the external way in which libraries use Web 2.0.

Additional references

Boyles, T. (2011). Small business and Web 2.0: Hope or hype?. Entrepreneurial Executive 16 81-96.

ITmatters. (2011, January 12). What is Web 2.0 technology.Australian Business Forum.

ITU. (2005). Definition of ‘open standards’. International Telecommunication Union.

McAfee, A. (2006). Enterprise 2.0: The dawn of emergent collaboration. MIT Sloan Management Review 47(3) 21-28.

Rai A., Patnayakuni, R., & Patnayakuni N. (1997). Technology investment and business performance. Communications of the ACM 40(7) 89-96.

Slainte. (2012). A guide to using Web 2.0 in libraries.