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05.18.10
Personalized Social Software Gains Footholds Within Enterprises
 By Bill Ives
Forrester's Rob Koplowitz writes that 2010 will be a defining year for enterprise 2.0 in his report, Enterprise Social Networking 2010 Market Overview. He goes on the writes that "a very broad and rich landscape of technology vendors will differentiate to stay relevant in this crowded market."
"With enterprise socialtechnologies, buyers must now assess vendors pursuing three distinctstrategies: commoditization, horizontal and vertical solutions, and integrationwith adjacent technologies." I would add that vendors are creating very featurerich tools as the many of the more pure play offerings are now adding suchadditions as micro-blogging within their suite.
I was especially interested in his data on social media adoptionthrough a survey of US and European KM decision makers. Rob found that in 2010nearly one-third of enterprises will officially support internal and orexternal social networking. Inaddition, wiki adoption will approach 50% in 2010 and they are the most populartool. He found that the wikipedia model can enable a broad community togenerate and maintain content. Another popular use case for wikis is as "alightweight workspace and project management tool where teams can authorcontent or coordinate activities and tasks with confidence that the informationis up to date."
The use cases for collaborative platforms were interesting. Collaboration on content (such as office documents was the top instance at 51%.Next was using a collaboration platform as a network ?leshare at 48%. Then 39%of the respondents said they were integrating our collaboration platform'scalendaring, scheduling, and task management featureswith their email messaging system and 28% said they wereusing a collaboration platform's Web 2.0 features such as blogs, Wikis, and RSS feeds, Finally 28% said they are using acollaboration platform to facilitate sharing of documentsand other content with their external partners andcustomer and 20% are not using a collaborative platform.
The report goes on to document how the vendors are responding tothese trends. IBM Lotusand Microsoft attempting to extend their dominant positionsin collaboration and messaging to social software. The many other venders are vendorspursuing "three distinct strategies: commoditization, horizontal and verticalsolutions, and integration with adjacent technologies." I have reviewed many ofthe venders sited include a number I have reviewed here and on the AppGap blogsuch as Atlassian, Box, Central Desktop, CubeTree, EMC, Jive, MindTouch, NewsGator, Novell, OpenText, PB Works, Socialtext, and Telligent. The report can be found on the Forrester web site.
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About the Author:
Dr. Bill Ives is an independent consultant and writer who has worked
with Fortune 100 companies in business uses of emerging technologies
for over 20 years. For several years he led the Knowledge Management
Practice for a large consulting firm.. Now he primarily helps companies
with their business blogs. He is also the VP of Social Media and
blogger for TVissimo, a new TV schedule search engine. Prior to
consulting, Dr. Ives was a Research Associate at Harvard University
exploring the effects of media on cognition. He obtained his Ph. D. in
Educational Psychology from the University of Toronto. Bill can be
reached at his blog: Portals and KM. He also writes for the FastForward blog and the AppGap blog. |
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