Saturday, 6 February 2010
Analysts Share Best Practices for Embracing Social Networking at Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit 2010, 9-11 March in Baltimore and 15-16 September in London
STAMFORD, Conn., February 2, 2010 —
Gartner, Inc. has revealed its key predictions on the use of social software and collaboration in the enterprise. These predictions focus on offerings ranging from team collaboration to dynamic social networking applications that offer rich profiles and activity streams.
“A lot has happened in a year within the social software and collaboration space. The growing use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by business users has resulted in serious enterprise dialogue about procuring social software platforms for the business,” said Mark R. Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner and co-chair of the Portals, Content and Collaboration (PCC) Summit. “Success in social software and collaboration will be characterized by a concerted and collaborative effort between IT and the business.”
Gartner offers five key predictions for social software:
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. During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts. 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. “
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.
Read the full article at Gartner