To overcome barriers to the adoption of social media and other Web 2.0 technologies in the workplace, organisations must embed usage into their business processes and ensure that individuals understand the personal value of employing them.

At present, social media is being embraced as an entertainment tool, but it is still yet to reach its potential in the business environment, despite great interest.

"Many customers are interested in understanding how to use the technology," says Rachel Phillips, technology director for Oracle’s Enterprise 2.0 collaboration software. "It is a definite hot topic. People are finding that there can be huge gains and so they are looking at how these concepts can be taken internally for productivity gains and collaboration. Enterprise 2.0 is seen as being a way to support business processes to make decisions in more informed ways when applied to business applications, and also improving workforce effectiveness."

However, its development is experiencing some barriers. According to Tazeeb Rajwani, a research fellow at the Cranfield School of Management, introducing the software itself is a relatively straightforward process. The hardest part, however, is changing human behaviour and motivating personnel to collaborate and use such technologies effectively.

"Value is key and it has to be aligned with business strategy. Whatever information you're going to try and capture and exchange, it has to add value to the bottom line," he says.

But the technology also has to be easy and enjoyable to use and it likewise "has to be of use or value to the individual employing it if those benefits are going to cascade to the bottom line," Rajwani adds.

This means that business managers need to understand both their organisational design and how target groups within the enterprise might be motivated to use the software if they are to overcome resistance to change and established 'best practice'.

"I'm not saying that corporate cultures need to change entirely, but new rituals may need to be introduced to enhance that culture. Organisations such as BT and Shell, for example, put reward systems in place to incentivise and motivate people to collaborate and to make it the norm," Rajwani said.

Phillips agrees. She cites the example of Directgov, which used crowd-sourcing techniques to improve the functionality of its website in a bid to attract more UK citizens to it.

As a result, rather than hire more development staff in-house, the body introduced a project called Innovate, a platform to enable conversation with the developer community around the innovative use of digital technologies. The aim was to incentivise developers to build citizen-focused applications that would be used on the website if they were good enough.

"The competition element was at the heart so the idea was to put it out there and gain the wisdom of the crowd," Phillips says.

She concludes: "Developers are incorporating Web 2.0 – in terms of wikis, blogs, workspace collaboration – but enterprise 2.0 isn't just for inside the firewall, it can also be important outside. And if you adopt it both internally and externally your organisation will gain larger benefits."