Almost three-quarters of European companies admit that their IT systems are not able adequately to support flexible and mobile working employees, research claimed today.

The revelation comes from an IDC poll of chief information officers and IT directors at 100 companies with more than 5,000 employees in Germany, France and the UK.

The admission is despite the fact that 68 per cent of firms believe that the number of mobile employees in their companies will rise, and 43 per cent believe that the number of virtual teams in their companies will grow.

"With all the mobile capabilities and dynamic collaboration required by virtual teams, the threat of fragmented communications derailing corporate goals of increasing market share and attracting new customers while lowering costs has never been greater," said Pim Bilderbeek, vice president of consulting, telecoms and networking research for Europe at IDC.

"What is needed is an open communications environment that combines unified communications with IT platforms and business process integration along with other streamlining capabilities."

Bilderbeek claimed that the survey, commissioned by Siemens Enterprise Communications, supports a concept which he refers to as 'Enterprise 2.0'.

This combines web 2.0 technologies and unified communications as well as their integration with existing horizontal and vertical business applications.

"Bringing social networking into the workplace is not about finding interesting people to date, but about finding people in your company with the knowledge and experience to provide guidance and best practice for completing a task in a better and more efficient way," said Bilderbeek.