Enterprise software giants Oracle released a new report into social business today in partnership with Social Media Today and Leader Networks.  The report intended to look at the rate of social business adoption, and my hopes were raised when they begin by talking about social business processes.  Indeed, the report provides a nice definition of what an enabled organisation is.

“A set of collaborative processes that have the potential to yield improved business processes that are customer-driven such as faster time to market with new products and services, more successful research and development outcomes and refined market messages that are explicitly influenced by customer needs.”

All of which sounds great, as it places the focus purely on behaviour and business outcomes rather than technology and platforms.

So you can imagine how my heart sank when the very first slide in the deck looks at how many social platforms the companies surveyed are using.  It didn’t really get a great deal better unfortunately, with the remainder of the report going on to reveal that companies believe social to be growing in importance, social insights gained are on the rise and so on.  Nothing really groundbreaking, and more importantly, nothing there that shows the reader how anything has been achieved.  It leaves one thinking, “well that’s nice, but what am I to do with this?”

Vanessa DiMauro, CEO of LeaderNetworks, defended the report to CMSWire, suggesting that the value of the study comes from the size of the organisations surveyed, and the status of the employees used.

“One of the critical differences here,” she said, “is the size and focus of this study. We had 923 respondents, and we screened out the small companies and had only mid- to large-sized organizations. We took out all the organizations with fewer than 100 employees. And we only looked at marketing and IT leaders. Anyone not in marketing or IT was pulled out of this study. It’s really a study of decision-makers in large organizations. We pulled out people who don’t have direct-reports. It has to meaningful.”

Both Oracle and LeaderNetworks have produced some valuable insights in the past, but for me, this report fails to do enough to build on the findings Oracle published back in June on the same topic.  See for yourself below.