So, Gart­ner is out “reveal­ing” its “five social soft­ware pre­dic­tions for 2010 and beyond”. I’ve not been able to resist com­ment­ing them…

By 2014, social net­work­ing ser­vices will replace e-mail as the pri­mary vehi­cle for inter­per­sonal com­mu­ni­ca­tions for 20 per­cent of busi­ness users.

Greater avail­abil­ity of social net­work­ing ser­vices both inside and out­side the fire­wall, cou­pled with chang­ing demo­graph­ics and work styles will lead 20 per­cent of users to make a social net­work the hub of their busi­ness communications.

Not sure: it will depends of the spe­cific busi­ness con­text of every orga­ni­za­tion. Sure, teens are using more heav­ily texts and mes­sag­ing func­tions in social net­works over email, but keep in mind they’re not inside an orga­ni­za­tion yet. The busi­ness real­i­ties can make emails really attrac­tive as a tool: offline use and acces­si­bil­ity in low-connectivity areas are exam­ples of email strengths in some indus­tries. So, 20 per­cent is too high for employ­ees of large organizations.

Dur­ing the next sev­eral years, most com­pa­nies will be build­ing out inter­nal social net­works and/or allow­ing busi­ness use of per­sonal social net­work accounts.

To allow, offi­cially and for­mally, busi­ness use of per­sonal social net­works accounts is still a long shot, as it will depend on the plat­forms them­selves invest­ing into com­pli­ance capa­bil­i­ties. Unlikely in my opinion.

Social net­work­ing will prove to be more effec­tive than e-mail for cer­tain busi­ness activ­i­ties such as sta­tus updates and exper­tise location.

“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,” said Matt Cain, research vice pres­i­dent at Gart­ner. “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. “

No news here.

Gart­ner rec­om­mends that orga­ni­za­tions 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.

How is this not obvious? ;)

By 2012, over 50 per­cent of enter­prises will use activ­ity streams that include microblog­ging, but stand-alone enter­prise microblog­ging will have less than 5 per­cent penetration.

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, to keep up with what col­leagues are doing, to get quick answers to ques­tions and so on.

“How­ever, it will be very dif­fi­cult for microblog­ging as a stand-alone func­tion to achieve wide­spread adop­tion within the enter­prise. Twitter’s scale is one of the rea­sons for its pop­u­lar­ity,” said Jef­frey Mann, research vice pres­i­dent for Gart­ner. “When lim­ited to a sin­gle enter­prise, that same scale is unachiev­able, reduc­ing the num­ber of users who will find it valu­able. Main­stream enter­prises are unlikely to adopt stand­alone, single-purpose microblog­ging products.

Seri­ously dis­ap­pointed by Gart­ner here, although there is no ques­tion activ­ity streams will be used by even more than 50 per­cent of enter­prises (more like 80% for me).

First, while hav­ing a hub that aggre­gates activ­i­ties across all appli­ca­tions, social or not, will be a must, actu­ally inte­grat­ing all capa­bil­i­ties into one tool may not be the best way for the major­ity of orga­ni­za­tions to increase the sig­nal to noise ratio for their knowl­edge work­ers. In other words, keep­ing micromes­sag­ing (much bet­ter name than “microblog­ging”, which is mis­lead­ing) as a sep­a­rate appli­ca­tion, with its UI, clients, etc. may be the most effec­tive deploy­ment at the user level — though not being sexy for ana­lysts or some IT folks, but who really cares if they are not happy?

Sec­ond, Gart­ner seems to be mak­ing the same mis­take as most top execs when con­sid­er­ing an appli­ca­tion like microblog­ging: though its deploy­ment will surely be global, with one infra­struc­ture open to all employ­ees (like email), its use and value will be extremely local­ized and for­mal­ized in busi­ness workflows.

Think of micromes­sag­ing as, purely, a com­mu­ni­ca­tion infra­struc­ture that:

• is real-time while being use­ful when accessed asynchronously
• can be tapped through web access, desk­top client, mobile client, SMS
• allows spe­cific group uses with secu­rity fea­tures (must-have for all respect­ing “Twit­ter for the enter­prise” applications)

You won’t get a big plat­form where every­one con­verse with every­one like the actual Twit­ter plat­form. You will get a plat­form where every­one can con­verse with col­leagues and groups based on busi­ness real­i­ties. Some groups will be very big, pro­duc­ing a behav­ior sim­i­lar to Twit­ter (for exam­ple groups based on com­mu­ni­ties of prac­tice with sev­eral thou­sands mem­bers), but most will be small, with a life based on the dura­tion of a project or task, and between all the play­ers involved (from 3–4 to 20–30).

For cor­po­rate social net­work­ing plat­forms: deploy­ment is global, but use and value are localized.



Through 2012, over 70 per­cent of IT-dominated social media ini­tia­tives will fail.

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 over a 70 per­cent fail­ure rate in IT-driven social media ini­tia­tives. Fifty per­cent of business-led social media ini­tia­tives will suc­ceed, ver­sus 20 per­cent of IT-driven initiatives.

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. But 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.

Pretty much agree here. The skills needed in IT: inter­nal man­age­ment con­sult­ing based on strong knowl­edge of both the new work­flows enabled by inno­v­a­tive tech­nolo­gies, and deep knowl­edge of the enterprise’s busi­ness con­text. Those inter­nal con­sult­ing group should sit out­side of both IT and the busi­ness, jus­tify their value by mea­sured improve­ment in busi­ness KPIs and have direct exec­u­tive access and sup­port. They could rely on exter­nal con­sul­tants to assist as needed, but man­age every engagement.



Within five years, 70 per­cent of col­lab­o­ra­tion and com­mu­ni­ca­tions appli­ca­tions designed on PCs will be mod­eled after user expe­ri­ence lessons from smart­phone col­lab­o­ra­tion appli­ca­tions.

As we move toward three bil­lion phones in the world serv­ing the main pur­pose of pro­vid­ing com­mu­ni­ca­tions and col­lab­o­ra­tion any­time any­where, Gart­ner expects more end users to spend sig­nif­i­cant time expe­ri­enc­ing the col­lab­o­ra­tive tools on these devices. For some of the world, these will be the first or the only appli­ca­tions they use. The expe­ri­ence with these tools for all who use them will enable the user to han­dle far more con­ver­sa­tions within a given amount of time than their PCs sim­ply because they are eas­ier to use. Just as the iPhone impacted user inter­face design on the desk­top, the lessons in the mobile phone col­lab­o­ra­tion space will dra­mat­i­cally affect PC appli­ca­tions, many of which are deriv­a­tives of decades-old plat­forms based on the PBX or other older col­lab­o­ra­tion paradigm.

“IT orga­ni­za­tions should con­tinue to pro­cure leading-edge smart­phones for test­ing and to accu­mu­late knowl­edge on how the col­lab­o­ra­tion appli­ca­tions on such devices accom­plish busi­ness tasks,” said Ken Dulaney, vice pres­i­dent and dis­tin­guished ana­lyst at Gart­ner. “As more orga­ni­za­tions con­sider replac­ing desk­phones with cell phones, they may wish to anchor their col­lab­o­ra­tion tools also on the cell phone.”

Agree but weak: in 5 years, the hard­ware options avail­able for mobile com­put­ing will be far bet­ter than what we call smart­phone today. Real valid com­par­i­son here is ver­sus con­sumer web/mobile appli­ca­tions, that’s what will pro­vide (much needed) inspi­ra­tion for the design of enter­prise applications.



Through 2015, only 25 per­cent of enter­prises will rou­tinely uti­lize social net­work analy­sis to improve per­for­mance and productivity.



Social net­work analy­sis is a use­ful method­ol­ogy for exam­in­ing the inter­ac­tion pat­terns and infor­ma­tion flows that occur among the peo­ple and groups in an orga­ni­za­tion, as well as among busi­ness part­ners and cus­tomers. How­ever, when sur­veys are used for data col­lec­tion, users may be reluc­tant to pro­vide accu­rate responses. When auto­mated tools per­form the analy­sis, users may resent know­ing that soft­ware is ana­lyz­ing their behav­ior. For these rea­sons, social net­work analy­sis will remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.

Before under­tak­ing a social net­work analy­sis, Gart­ner rec­om­mends that the orga­ni­za­tion ensure that it has the trust and buy-in of the peo­ple it hopes to include in the analy­sis in advance. Issues of pri­vacy and con­fi­den­tial­ity must be addressed and a deter­mi­na­tion needs to be made regard­ing how the infor­ma­tion will be used and com­mu­ni­cated. Estab­lish­ing the ground rules upfront will encour­age more open and hon­est par­tic­i­pa­tion and reduce the resis­tance to ongo­ing rela­tion­ship monitoring.

Same old argu­ment here: sur­veys will be lied to, and auto­matic col­lec­tion of inter­ac­tions need to be exhaus­tive across all chan­nels to be use­ful (yes, even phone calls (and conf calls with that!) would need to be logged and ana­lyzed, or you miss a good chunk of inter­ac­tions). I’ve not yet seen a SNA appli­ca­tion or solu­tion that could work across 100% of even generic chan­nels, not even speak­ing of in-house appli­ca­tions that could be the main inter­ac­tion fire­hoses internally.

SNA is a good sell for ana­lyst firms and con­sul­tants, because it is sexy and has a few good exam­ples that are used as demon­stra­tors, but in prac­tice the tools are not there yet to col­lect the data needed (the analy­sis is easy).