Social Computing Trends: 2010 and Beyond

Diptarup Chakraborti examines what you will need to know about social computing in the next few years

The social software and collaboration space consists of offerings ranging from team collaboration to dynamic social networking applications that offer rich profiles and activity streams. The scenarios explained below look at upcoming trends and what they mean for business users. Products built around a single capability, however innovative they may be, will be subsumed into larger enterprise social software platforms. E-mail, which is a mission-critical application, will see its usage impacted by social networking services in the next few years. Enterprise social media initiatives that involve only IT and not business users will be doomed to failure. Success in social software and collaboration will be characterized by a concerted and collaborative effort between IT and the business.

A lot has happened in a year within the social software and collaboration space. The growing use of Twitter and Facebook by business users has resulted in serious enterprise dialogue about procuring social software platforms for the business. Businesses, although fearing security and privacy concerns, see the major vendors as a secure source for the adoption of social software technologies. Smaller or niche vendors are still vying for enterprise attention offering standalone and specific functionality.

Scenario 1: By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20% of business users

• Key Findings: Greater availability of social networking services both inside and outside the firewall, coupled with changing demographics and work styles will lead 20% of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications. During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts. Newer employees will enter the workforce with a predisposition to communicate via a social network but they will use e-mail in parallel optimizing the business need with the communication modality. Social networking will prove to be more effective then e-mail for certain business activities such as status updates and expertise location.
• Market Implications: The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities. Vendors such as Microsoft and IBM will add links to internal and external social networks from within e-mail clients and will make services such as contacts, calendars and tasks shareable across e-mail and social networks. While e-mail is already almost fully penetrated in the corporate space, we expect to see steep growth rates for sales of premises- and cloud-based social networking services. Organizations will deploy hybrid models where some services live on-premises and some are in the cloud.
• Recommendations: Organizations should develop a long-term strategy for provisioning and consuming a rich set of collaboration and social software services, and develop policies governing the use of consumer services for business purposes. Companies should also solicit input from the business community on what collaboration tools would be most helpful. Organizations should provide guidance and education on what collaboration modality is most suitable for a particular business circumstance. Finally, organizations should not try and dictate what communication modality is preferred but let users choose their own course except in cases where compliance, security or retention concerns prevail.

Scenario 2: By 2012, over 50% of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but standalone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5% penetration

• Key Findings: The huge popularity of the consumer microblogging service Twitter has led many organizations to look for an ‘enterprise Twitter,’ that provides microblogging functionality with more control and security features to support internal use between employees. Enterprise users want to use microblogging for many of the same reasons that consumers do; to share quick insights, keep up with what colleagues are doing, get quick answers to questions and so on. Yammer has achieved a fair amount of adoption with its service restricting access to users from the same company’s e-mail domain.
  However, it will be difficult for microblogging as a standalone function to achieve widespread adoption within the enterprise. Twitter's scale is one of the reasons for its popularity, so that, to an extent, it is popular because it is so popular. There may be lots of meaningless trivia, but with millions of users and billions of tweets, Twitter also contains compelling content. When limited to a single enterprise, that same scale is unachievable, reducing the number of users who will find it valuable. While some organizations are seeing value from their enterprise microblogging efforts, many others report that only a few users actively participate, or that after an initial period of growth, usage drops off quickly. Mainstream enterprises are unlikely to adopt standalone, single purpose microblogging products.
• Market Implications: Most major social software platforms, including Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and Lotus Connections, include microblogging features embedded in the context of a larger activity stream. We expect others to soon follow. Standalone microblogging products need to build their offerings out to include other social software capabilities, provide deeper microblogging functionality than their platform competitors, or make it easy to embed their content in other platforms.
• Recommendations: Before making a significant commitment to a standalone enterprise microblogging platform, users should determine whether their strategic collaboration or social software platforms do or plan to provide microblogging services. Dedicated microblogging products will generally provide more extensive functionality than the broader platform suites, but the suites have the advantage of being able to embed microblog content in other contexts.

Scenario 3: Through 2012, over 70% of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail

• Key Findings: Our research indicates that a prevalent ‘provide and pray’ enterprise practice (providing a social software tool and praying something valuable comes from it), is driving high social media failure rates. This ‘provide and pray’ poor practice is rooted in IT's tendency to focus on the social software tools rather than how they can be applied to deliver business value. A focus on technology distracts from the important effort of understanding specific business relevant behaviors of target audiences to deliver a social media solution that empowers new behaviors for business value. When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value. Through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. This will result in an over 70% failure rate in IT-driven social media initiatives. 50% of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20% of IT-driven.
• Market Implications: Enterprises will need to develop entirely new skill sets around designing and delivering social media solutions. Until this happens, failure rates will remain high. A dearth of methods, technologies and tools will impede the design and delivery of social media solutions in the near term. In addition to the high profile successes we will also see significant failures which will constrain social media adoption in the near term. Nevertheless, in the long term, enterprises will realize that social media is not a ‘hit or miss’ activity naturally prone to high failure rates and that a calculated approach to social media solution delivery must be an IT competency. At that point, post 2012, the social software market growth will accelerate as will the overall impact of social media on business and society.
• Recommendations: Enterprise IT must avoid a focus on technology and concentrate on engaging the business in formulating how social media can have a positive mission impact.
• Create a team, spanning IT and the business that will oversee social media initiatives
• Build a tangible enterprise vision for and approach to social media
• Build a competency in social media solution delivery for engaging and deriving value from the collective.

The author is Principal Research Analyst, Gartner