On the heels of the Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, Jive Software has released a sponsored study of executive attitudes toward Enterprise 2.0--or as Jive likes to call it, Enterprise Social Software.

As regular readers know, I always love vendor studies that seem to find exactly what they are hoping to find, and the latest one from Jive, called the Jive Social Index 1H 2011, found that to no great surprise, executives are hot for social software, email is a growing but not particularly effective form of communication and they value app stores--which happens to be a new initiative from Jive. Coincidence? We think not.

So what exactly did Jive find? Well, for starters, two-thirds of executives surveyed said social software represents a fundamental shift in how companies work and engage with customers. Ninety-six percent said that social software would add value to at least one key performance indicator with 67 percent believing it would improve customer engagement and 57 percent believing it would increase sales or revenue. Eighty-three percent of executives surveyed reported using at least one social network for work.

In spite of this apparent enthusiasm for social software in the enterprise, only 17 percent of the same executives reported being ahead of the curve in this area, leaving what would seem to be a big gap between where executives believe corporate culture needs to be to succeed moving forward and what they are actually doing.

It's an interesting conundrum, but I'm sure Jive would be more than willing to help introduce these people to their products and move them along. While I saw some good attendance at this year's Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, and attitudes are clearly changing, I'm still not convinced that executives are fully on board with this just yet, at least in the numbers this survey would suggest.

For more information:
- see the Jive press release

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