Jun 28th, 2010 |
Another Enterprise 2.0 is in the books! This year’s show featured a lot more diversity in terms of content and focus, moving beyond a social networking and into areas such as video, organizational strategies, and policy/governance. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the show was the evolution of collaboration beyond stand-alone platforms and into the very fabric of the organization.
For the last few years the social product landscape has been centered on delivering applications that provided specific uses or functionalities. For example; blogs, wikis, microblogs, discussion forums, etc. Over time stand-alone applications have merged into social computing suites such as Newsgator social sites, Jive SBS, and Socialtext.
Now, we’re seeing the next wave: Social computing in the context of organizational applications and processes. The first shot across the bow was Salesforce.com’s Chatter, introduced a few months ago as a social application that is baked into Salesforce’s CRM; meaning employees could leverage social collaboration tools directly from within the application they were already using. We’ve seen other examples such as integration of public social network connectors into Lotus Notes and Microsoft Exchange. Recently Jive demonstrated integration of SBS with SAP at this year’s SAPPHIRE NOW event in Orlando.
Vendors at Enterprise 2.0 took this concept one step further with announcements from Cisco, Jive, and Socialtext not only enhanced collaboration/social platforms (Quad, SBS 4.5, and Socialtext 4.0 respectively), but new APIs and developer support to interface these social tools with business process applications. Initially this means a greater ability to collaborate in the context of specific reports, management information, or ERP applications.
Longer term, I expect we’ll see collaboration flow the opposite way; so as with Salesforce chatter, social tools will be available within business application interfaces as well as within stand-alone social suites. This presents some challenges for those responsible for social strategy. It’s possible that rather than deploying an enterprise-wide social platform, the challenge becomes to integrate various islands of social applications that are wrapped into business process tools to enable common search, profile management, and administration. Perhaps we’ll see OpenSocial become the de-facto tool for interconnecting these islands.
Another aspect of this trend is a requirement for greater communication between collaboration planners and application developers. One of the key trends we’ve highlighted in our recent research is growing integration of those responsible for voice, messaging, and video with those responsible for social software, now that group will need to include internal application development resources who can leverage these new integration capabilities.
What we’re seeing is a maturation of the social computing landscape. It’s no longer about “which cool new tool can I deploy” but how can I leverage these tools to improve the overall ability of those within and outside my organization to communicate and collaborate.
Irwin,
I agree with you. The challenge for the Unifed Communications vendors has been the ability to integrate the applications with business process. All of the leading contact center vendors have CEBP-Communication Enabled Business Process API’s.
Collaboration is at the same crossroads. Salesforce.com has taken the lead by integrating the Chatter application to include non traditional customer facing departments. The Cisco Quad solution will take enterprise collaboration, and contact center integration to the next level by using the complete suite of unified communications and collaboration tools.
The customer service organizations need to deal with new social media channels, communities and now develop a strategy to embrace enterprise collaboration!
The next 12 months will be nteresting to see how the customer embraces the various solutions, and who will survive.
Yes, i could not have agree more with your blog. From my past experience working in an Government organisation, people were skeptical about “Sharing” or “Collaboration”. But soon after months passed by, you’ll be amazed how the social community in a working environment took in-charge and their willingness to share their creative thoughts and ideas among other colleagues and stakeholders. Thus, this should be the way forward as part of Enterprise 2.0.
Great post Irwin! You brought up a really interesting observation in the current state of enterprise collaboration industry, which is providing standalone applications vs. add-on features, this is also something what I’ve noticed from this years E2CON at Boston from reading numerous news and analysis reports. Vendors are waking up to a more and more competitive enterprise software market, and they realize it is only through differentiating itself from the pack can they realize profits and market shares. So in your opinion, do you think vendors taking a side of either providing standalone application or add-on features is the first big step towards differentiating itself in the market?
Thanks again!
I think that this article is spot on, and that’s why at Blogtronix we have been talking recently about our product as a hub that provides a social layer over specific business applications using API and custom modules. A blogtronix community can be used for not only internal collaboration but creating an external support and/or branding, thereby connecting all faces of your business in a single heirarchy.