Case Study: Northwestern Mutual's Enterprise Web 2.0 Journey

Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 tools and services is growing, and Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company (NM) is among the early adopters. The traditionally conservative company began investigating Web 2.0 in 2005 and has since deployed blogs and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to its entire employee base of about 5,000. NM has seen improvements in corporate communications, team productivity, and worker productivity as a result. Like many firms though, NM has struggled to determine a hard ROI; questions about the further applicability of Web 2.0 to the enterprise still linger; and the company has seen strong, but not blockbuster, employee usage. For Web 2.0 technology marketers the Northwestern Mutual case holds valuable lessons.