Enterprise Web 2.0 Q&A: Northwestern Mutual

Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 tools and services is growing, and The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company (Northwestern Mutual) 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. Northwestern Mutual has seen improvements in corporate communications, team productivity, and worker productivity as a result. Like many firms though, Northwestern Mutual has struggled to determine a hard return on investment (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 information and knowledge management (I&KM) professionals, the Northwestern Mutual case holds valuable lessons.