collaboration station

Dr Dan points me to this Forrester op ed by Ray Wang. Some comments:

• Figure 3 offers "Implement an enterprise collaboration strategy" (a priority for 49%) and "Adopt Web 2.0 Technologies" (a priority for 24%) as separate priorities. The major pay-off for social software (inside the enterprise at least) is enhanced collaboration - as the E2EF repeated again and again. Hell, even Tom Davenport as come round to the idea that social software is the new KM. So why are we breaking these out as spearate things?
• Possibly because as figure 5 indicates. 77% of them already have some form of collaboration software. In fact, they probably have multiple types of collaboration software that they cannot fit together. Hence the desire to implement a collaboration strategy.
• Figure 6 indicates what surveys (many of them from Forrester) have shown repeatedly*, familiar tech like surveys & discussion threads are most popular with wikis next on the list. Evil, terrible social networking tools are much less popular. RSS & tagging have the biggest "uh, wuh?" factor.

The pitch for social software within the enterprise for IT guys (rather than people in the business) is as collaboration glue. Want a way of joining these myriad collaboration tools? Well social software is it. Think of it as middleware for carbon-based lifeforms...

*Is this a genuine trend or are the same people being asked again and again?

Forrester put someone else's money where their mouth is

It slipped my attention that Forrester are saying the US corporate social software market is worth $300M and is set to increase 5-fold over the next 5 years - remaining equally split between internal & external applications.

Points of interest:
- $300 million is not a lot of money in the grand scheme of things. But given the prevalence of open-source software in this area, is it worthwhile comparing spending on web 2.0 stuff with spending on, say, ERP?
- The equal split the internal & external uses (E2.0 has been getting more noise of late but still little compared to commercial world uses).
- The lion's share of the $ is being spent on social networking software. Which comes as a bit of a surprise. With most people I talk to, it's wikis, wikis, wikis for internal experiments. I'm guessing the social networking spend is being driven by external applications & marketing budgets!?!

UPDATE: A little information may be a dangerous thing. Check out the comments section regarding what the figures actually refer to.