I want to pass along a pre-publication snapshot of custom research that bears on the thread around Enterprise 2.0 adoption.

In December, 2006 and January, 2007 FAST partnered with the Economist Intelligence Unit to undertake an original research project on understanding the impact of “Web 2.0” in business—today and going forward. The summary results of this project will be presented at FASTForward 2007. The full report will be available later in February at www.fastsearch.com.

Using survey and interview interactions with over 400 upper level executives, over 40% of whom represent the C-suite or board-level directors, the research design focused on eliciting current perspectives of senior managers on everything from their understanding of the definition of “Web 2.0” to the specific ways they anticipate that the trend will affect their firm’s revenues, expenses, and operations.

The attached chart - Adoption of 2.0 Capabilities for Enterprise - illustrates the current situation on adoption rates and adoption planning for consensus 2.0 functionalities that emerged from the research.

While blogs and wikis lead in terms of the attention they have gotten in the early going of the past couple of years, the strong interest in online communities and soliciting customer engagement in innovation anticipates a trend toward more open business models that in the end will be far more important than the technologies of user participation themselves.

Real business value will be created by core network effects that wind up transforming elements of the way companies do business. So the theme becomes “it’s the network, stupid,” not simply the tooling, however much of a change the tools themselves represent.