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Enterprise Social: Business Chart Investments in Collaborative Tools
The Enterprise is feeling pressure to adopt for internal use some of the same sorts of social media technologies made popular by FaceBook, Twitter, WordPress, Blogger and Wikipedia. A Forrester Research report written by Rob Koplowitz, vice president and principal analyst, gives an overview of the current state of Enterprise Social Platforms. [A complementary copy of the report is available from Telligent, one of the companies included in the comparative report.]
Social Media has the attention of the Enterprise. Forrester reports that 37 percent of IT decision makers have plans to implement collaboration and social media-style tools over the next year, while less than 25 percent are planning to further invest in traditional enterprise applications, like ERP, HR and PLM.
The reason for the interest in enterprise social media? Forrester outlines these three factors:
- Better sharing and reuse of knowledge, process and procedures among employees
- Better for connecting and enabling close communications with a remote/dispersed workforce
- Employees have become used to consumer social media and expect similar technology to be available as a tool within the enterprise
Who are the winners in Forrester’s report? Based on somewhat restrictive criteria used by Forrester only nine companies were reviewed for the report. Forrester concluded that IBM, Jive, Newsgator and Telligent offered the most functionality and had the best long-range strategy. The top names are similar to those reported late last year by Gartner in their 2010 report on Social Enterprise companies. In that report, Microsoft, Jive, IBM and Telligent were considered the leaders.
The number of available products with social media and collaboration capabilities is very large. But many capable products like Alfresco, Moxie, Salesforce’s Chatter, and Yammer weren’t included in these reports. The Forrester report also omits almost any discussion about how consumer social media applications, like FaceBook and Twitter are being used, perhaps in even a much larger role, than some of the companies that were included in the review.
