The study is the latest in the TechRadar series, Forrester’s research methodology used to predict the success of a set of related technologies over the next decade. The enterprise Web 2.0 analysis provides insight for two roles: Information & Knowledge Management professionals and Vendor Strategy professionals.
"Web 2.0 collaboration technologies solve problems that enterprises have today, but most companies have not used these tools anywhere near their potential" said Gil Yehuda, senior analyst, Forrester Research. "This new research illustrates to enterprise users where the smart money is invested and where to place their strategic bets. In the current economic climate, Forrester believes collaboration tools can save enterprises operation costs by getting people and processes together quickly and efficiently"
"While so much of the buzz around Web 2.0 has focused on the business-to-consumer market, the greatest opportunity today for vendors is in the business-to-business collaboration space" said Oliver Young, analyst, Forrester Research. "Some Web 2.0 collaboration technologies have shown a faster-than-normal life cycle, so it is critical for vendors to take stock of the enterprise tools that have the greatest long-term potential and invest wisely in those technologies"
Forrester previously estimated the enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration market will hit $1.8 billion by 2013. The enterprise Web 2.0 TechRadar study is based upon an analysis of previous research and interviews with industry experts, vendors responsible for building or implementing these technologies, and enterprise customers and users.
Forrester predicts the following Web 2.0 collaboration technologies will continue to experience growth:
o Social networks (cultural resistance exists, but Forrester believes this will eventually break)
o Wikis (users report success with Wiki endeavors, particularly when sponsored by business leaders)
o Blogging (social networks will breathe new life into internal blogs by providing more context to blogged content, but Forrester found that blogging alone does not capture the audience’s attention)
o RSS (underappreciated in the enterprise)
The following Web 2.0 technologies have large and resilient ecosystems, according to Forrester, and can last for several years or even decades, but over time, the markets will become highly consolidated, customer numbers will flatten, and revenues will level off or decline:
o Podcasting is on the decline. Users tell Forrester that podcasts in the context of enterprise productivity and collaboration are neither very engaging nor immersive, and the vendor landscape is shrinking.
o Forums are underused. While forums will continue on as a fundamental enabling technology for collaboration, the marketplace is flat, and forums will become part of larger community-focused packages.
View the full report Enterprise Web 2.0" and "Forrester TechRadar™ For Vendor Strategists: Enterprise Web 2.0" are currently available to Forrester RoleView™ clients and can be purchased directly at forrester.com.
Bill Ives agrees with most of the reports findings, but believes mashups should be listed with the social networking and wikis as “significant” successful technologies:
“In my discussions with vendors, mashups are being increasingly used as the application development platform underlying many tools,” says Ives in his post More from Forrester on the Future of Enterprise 2.0 Technologies. “So it is both getting harder to separate them and they are becoming more pervasive. I think social bookmarks provide a useful utility that is getting integrated into other tools.”
However, Bill cautions organizations who look at all or any of these tools as a stand-alone technology working in isolation.
“I see an increasing movement among vendors to provide integrated platforms that make use of a number of these tools. Even a very focus(ed) tool like Connectbeam combines social networking with social bookmarking and integrates it with search. Broader platforms like Traction make use of blogs, wikis, forums, and, most recently microblogging. Deki Wiki and Central Desktop combine many of these tools with a wiki platform under the covers.”
My study on Intranet 2.0 reveals similar findings about the adoption rate and usefulness of these technologies – and why some companies aren’t bothering to adopt them. If you want a full copy of the findings, you must complete the survey– even if you don’t have Web 2.0 / Intranet 2.0 tools your feedback is invaluable. To that end, make sure you please take 10 minutes to take the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and you’ll get a copy of the full results including the good, bad and learned lessons.
(AARHUS, DENMARK) “There’s a lot of stories and
expirments about wikis… and misconceptions’ says Dorthe Jespersen, an analyst
with J. Boye, and co-author of author of the report, Wiki in the Enterprise.
Jespersen
cites three major myths (or perceptions) of why organizations choose a wiki:
1-Everyone contributes
2-It’s easy
3-Information at hand
Myth 1: Everyone
contributes
The most
common means or purposes for using a wiki include:
Brainstorming
Project work
Meeting agendas
Encyclopedia
Manual
Documentation
Intranet
Communicating externally
Common
corporate refrains (comments):
·“We didn’t know what to expect and how to communicate at
all in the wiki.”
·“No one wanted to write in the wiki. And those who did,
got offended when others edited their text.”
Unfortunately,
for those that have started using wikis well-know, if you build it, they will
not come.
Myth 2:
It’s easy
Jespersen
points no further than Wikipedia’s editor (editor’s note: if you thought your CMS editor was user unfriendly…).
Myth 3:
Information (will always be) at hand
The wiki
is not necessarily going to give you what you need. Jespersen cites the search
engine in MediaWiki that produces very unruly and confusing results. Like most
technologies, the technology is as only as good as the people involved and
their contributions to the technology (editor’s opinion).
Jespersen
and the J. Boye report Wiki in the Enterprise offer four over-arching
recommendations for deploying wikis on the intranet:
Organisational readiness.
Organisational culture is a critical factor for success in wiki projects.
Organisations must be comfortable with sharing information and debating
openly.
Setting expectations. Before
deploying a wiki organisations should assess the commitment actually
required, both from management and employees.
Getting adoption. Adoption of
the wiki will not happen by itself; rather it can be supported through a
prepared launch followed by training.
Content creation. To tackle
problems with structure running wild and quality of content, employ
training, guidelines and dedicated wiki managers.
As I
highlighted last week in Web
2.0 not a priority for CIOs, the adoption rate of social media is
surprisingly low given the adoption by every day consumers. Here’s the summary:
14% of organizations use
blogs
13% use social tagging
software
11% use wikis
72% of CIOs have no plans to
use blogs in the next 5 years
74% no plans to use wikis
Last year’s
Global
Intranet Survey of 177 global intranet managers (medium to large
organizations with 5,000 to 100,000 employees) found that Intranet 2.0 adoption
is not much better:
Less than 20% of the
respondents that have more than 50,000 employees have established 2.0
strategies
None of the respondents with employees
in the 5,000 – 50,000 employees have 2.0 strategies
About 30% or less have
implemented blogs
About 40% have implemented
wikis
While
Prescient’s Intranet
2.0 Global Survey is an important one, it is focused solely on Intranet
2.0. Jane McConnell has prepared the 2008 Global Intranet Survey
and if you haven’t signed up to participate then don’t hesitate further: your
organization needs this information and you need to participate so you can get
a copy of the 2008 results as soon as possible (THE DEADLINE IS THIS SUNDAY, AUGUST 31). To participate, send an email to Jane specifying:
“Looking for greater flexibility and support for more ad hoc processes, employees have responded with a more bottom-up approach, in some cases circumventing official information systems,” say CMS Watch Founder Tony Byrne and contributing analyst Jarod Gingras, the principal authors of The Enterprise Social Software Report 2008.
CMS Watch's social media vendors matrix.
In other words, if your organization hasn’t embraced and standardized social software, your employees will begin installing it and using it without your permission. I know of what client that only found out recently that 15% of their employee base had voluntarily joined a dedicated company Facebook site. At BT, 4,000 employees formed their own “BT Facebook” site. BT took note and in response built their own social networking site called MyBT (see The power of Intranet 2.0).
If your organization hasn’t already developed an Intranet 2.0 plan (social media plan), you would do well to develop one before employees develop their own. This plan ideally contains the business case for moving to Intranet 2.0. Byrne and Gingras cite a number of business benefits to implementing enterprise social software:
While a plan is a must, an even more difficult task may be the selection of the actual software that will power your Intranet 2.0 – there are now hundreds of solutions on the market. The Enterprise Social Software Report dissects the capabilities of 20 different social software (social media) solutions for Intranet 2.0 (or Web 2.0) including those from:
IBM (Lotus Connections)
SharePoint
Connectbeam
Facebook
Google (Blogger)
MediaWiki
Socialtext
and others
Each of these solutions are reviewed for their business service uses including:
Blog
Wiki
Social Ranking
Project Tracking & Participation
Multimedia
Info Filtering
File Sharing
Web Conferencing
Discussion Forums
Presence / Instant Messaging (IM)
People Finding (e.g. social networking)
All of this is rated according to various Administration & System Services (e.g. security, analytics, etc.) and various corporate scenarios (e.g. Enterprise Collaboration, Project Collaboration, etc.).
Some interesting notes regarding the two big solutions, SharePoint and Lotus Connections / Quickr:
Lotus Connections / Quickr: strong social networking, strong presence and IM tools, excellent integration with Notes and emerging Outlook connectors, and an innovative Blackberry application; “underwhelming blog/wiki” and requires WebSphere Portal for roles and group modules – best for Enterprise Networking; poor for Project Collaboration.
Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS 2007): broad range of third-party plug-ins, lightweight portal services including bundled applications and lightweight document and records management services into social applications, search works well in an all-SharePoint environment; almost all native services are weak compared to competitors, near complete absence of social networking, social tagging & Bookmarking, and surprisingly weak integration with Outlook – best for Project Collaboration (e.g. team sites); poor for Enterprise deployments.
In short, Lotus is a better enterprise solution; SharePoint is a better project or team solution.
Regardless, 20 different products are reviewed in detail (from 10 – 25 pages per product review) and it’s a worthwhile read if you are looking at implementing social media or Intranet 2.0 software. Buy CMS Watch’s Enterprise Social Media Report 2008 (they offer a 30-day, 100% money-back guarantee).
If you’re looking to move to Intranet 2.0, but don’t exactly know how, then have a look at our Intranet 2.0 Blueprint service, or call me at 416.986.2226.
There are a number of reasons why a corporation or a not-for-profit should adopt Intranet 2.0 tools.Enhancing communications and collaboration with employees, and improving employee investment and retention are primary considerations. But there’s another more pressing need: snooze or lose.
While the intranet still plays poor cousin to the all-important website, intranet 2.0 cannot play backseat to any organization looking to differentiate itself from the competition.
“You really have no choice,” says Steve Krol, EVP of Professional Services with Lyons Consulting Group, which has worked with the likes of AON, Porsche and even Playboy. “Social media represents a full-fledge media /communication channel that will evolve with or without you. It’s another accepted form of communications that people want.
According to a web survey by the Software Information & Industry Association, only 41% of participants are using social media, but 35% plan to use it. While the survey is not scientifically significant for all organizations in all industries and is biased towards the audience that participated, the numbers are pretty close to the mark. As it relates to large organizations, the numbers echo other recent study findings from CIO and Forrester. However, the adoption numbers are far smaller in small and medium size organizations.
While there are many benefits that most organizations can reap from employing Enteprise 2.0 tools, Krol cites five over-arching employee benefits:
Engagement
Retention
Productivity
Cost Reduction
Time-to-market
While the softer more ethereal benefits such as “engagement” and “productivity” will not excite too many accountants, there are plenty of case studies that demonstrate real return on investment (ROI) including costs savings and increased revenue.
INTRANET 2.0 CASE STUDIES
T. Rowe Price adds 1,500 workers to work in its call center for each tax season (for approximately 3 months). Training these workers is large, involved exercise, but imperfect. Price’s corporate trainers got smart and transferred the entire training program to a wiki. Price encouraged new employees to take notes during the sessions and then add notes, comments and recommendations to the wiki. As a result, the company estimates that it saves one to two minutes per call at $20 per minute (the net result is in the millions of dollars).
BlueShirt Nation (BSN) is a secure and private social networking site for more than 100,000 Best Buy employees. Established by Best Buy as a means of engaging employees for ideas for innovation and improving the business, the online community encourages discussion about whatever they want to talk about (e.g. pets, sports, etc.).
“In general, they talk about how to make Best Buy a better place,” says founder and sponsor Gary Koelling. “Improve on the things we don't do well, share the things that we do do well, talk about and express the culture that we have, talk about customers- both good and bad.”
Some control was sacrificed to help increase the engagement which among other things encouraged employees to participate in a video contest that promoted their 401k retirement campaign. Employees were encouraged to upload their own videos to the site as part of the contest (see a sample at Best Buy Using Social Media for Employee Engagement). Out of 140,000 Best Buy employees (almost all young), BSN helped increase the number of employees signing up for 401(k) accounts by 30%, and no doubt has contributed to a significant increase in employee retention in a tight staffing market.
At Placemaking, the entire intranet is built on a wiki platform (Intranet case study: Intrawest Placemaking). A Placemaking project manager using the intranet (wiki) created a page about a method of finishing concrete floors that creates an appearance better than tile at a substantially lower cost – saving the company $500,000 and reducing the project timeline. Other project managers in Florida and Nevada posted comments to the page, asking further questions and adding comments. In response, Hartigan posted photos of the finished job and addressed their comments. The other construction managers planned on using this valuable knowledge in future projects, potentially saving the company millions of dollars.
Adopting an intranet wiki or blog however should not be done without the requisite planning and change management. Here are a number of suggestions for proceeding:
Listen - Understand and monitor the social web to see what is being said about you, and ask your customers / employees what they want.
Monitor - Ensure you’re aware of which community websites (e.g. YouTube) your audience and competitors are using
Benchmark - Understand the ingredients of a good blog, wiki or podcast; watch and cherry-pick from the leaders
Leadership – Senior management must set the tone; your executives must be leading the dialogue and controlling the message
Plan - Planning is an essential requisite for success; develop a plan that is based on a thorough assessment and contains key performance indicators (KPIs)
Governance – very tool needs an owner and a policy (terms of use)
Technology - choose your vendors carefully based on business requirements & needs
Refresh – keep your content and tools relevant and fresh, and ensure they cross-promote your latest products and services
Measure - Document the link between social media and the business and develop a set of performance metrics with baselines that are regularly measured
Engage – gather constant feedback and act quickly on necessary changes
Finally, consider an Enterprise 2.0 undertaking as “evolution not revolution” – there’s no need to solve the world on your first attempt; test and pilot solutions and enhance as necessary before trying to conquer the world.
11 INTRANET 2.0 SOLUTIONS TO WATCH:
WorkLight
WorkBook
ConnectBeam
SocialText
Google Gadgets
Lotus Connections
Quickr
SharePoint
SelectMinds
Cogenz
ThoughtFarmer
READ THE ENTERPRISE 2.0 VERSION WITH WEB CASE STUDY EXAMPLES:
SharePoint continues to be at the center of much of the intranet buzz – regardless of the water cooler, conference or country.
Shawn Shell, CEO of Consejo, and author of CMS Watch’s The SharePoint Report 2008 from CMS Watch, accurately summarizes SharePoint in one telling quote during his SharePoint presentation at Enterprise 3: “SharePoint does a lot of things, but it does very few things very well.”
I have maintained for sometime that SharePoint is an excellent intranet platform for departments, or small to medium-size enterprises. We in fact use it for our intranet at Prescient Digital Media (disclosure: we are fully technology-neutral with no partnerships nor reselling agreements with any technology vendor including Microsoft). But I don’t think that Sharepoint (MOSS 2007) is an appropriate enterprise intranet for medium to large organizations that need more robust content management, document management, and application integration. Nonetheless, SharePoint does have its strengths, and weaknesses, regardless of the client organization.
In no particular order, here are some of Shawn’s insights on SharePoint (and his company Consejo works almost exclusively on SharePoint implementations):
PROS:
Biggest strength: collaboration features and forcing compliance with information management policies.
OTHER STRENGTHS:
Blogs are built into every My Site
Wikis are out of the box
Reports – the ability to display and work with data from an Xcel worksheet.
Simple to use out-of-the-box
Search is very fast
Contributing content is simple
Direct integration with Office (XP to 2007)
Most functionality “exposed” through web services (e.g. all content can be subscribed to via RSS)
Mobile views via a PDA or phone is out-of-the-box
Alerts and workflow (though limited to email notification)
WSRP and SAP integration is included
I would add that if you’re an enterprise Microsoft customer, you can get MOSS for very cheap if not free (but the licensing typically represents 10-30% of the total cost). As well, simple out-of-the-box SharePoint management needs little to no training.
CONS:
Biggest weakness: Records management and digital asset management (non existent).
OTHER WEAKNESSES:
The wiki piece is a little weak (“The rumor is that the wiki and blog components were very late additions… they work very well, but the functionality is considerably lower than what you would expect from an enterprise deployment.”)
Sharepoint does not provide native support for AJAX (though there are work-arounds, MS will not support AJAX)
Customization can be expensive and complex (and limited)
Content management (“It’s very average content management… its not very fabulous.”)
Analytics are very, very simple
MOSS does cannot consume its own RSS feeds
Non-Active Directory authentication capabilities
Social networking built into MySites
Search returns documents and people
WSRP and SAP integration is not terribly strong, but it works.
I would add the following weaknesses: immature technology, weak templates, and a reputation for weak service and training.
Shawn’s recommendations when considering or implementing SharePoint:
Understand information quantities and needs
Don’t just throw collaboration tools out there (he cited one client with “out-of-control” team sites and SharePoint sprawl)
Establish & enforce standards for use
Establish and closely monitor metrics for content creation
Continually evaluate and adjust approach to match reality
Enforce workspace use metrics
Notify of non-use after 60 days
Four notifications
Delete after fourth notification
Use workflow to suspend assets
Re-map and migrate intranet sites into Sharepoint
Use Search to Capture Outlying Sites
Create a controlled vocabulary (taxonomy and meta data)
Measure and measure again
Track search requests against workgroup assets
Shawn’s advice of what not to do:
Enforcing standards inappropriate for collaborative environment (ditch the Big Brother persona)
Repeat monolithic hierarchy (reduce the red tape)
Exclude active participants / authors
Ignore advantages of “competing” tools (e.g. Lotus SameTime)
Search results must be validated and in context
By the way… the next version of Sharepoint will be released in 2010 along with Office version 14 (MS is superstitiously skipping version 13).
