notes and views on crm, social media, and the human side of information technology

The Sexification of Enterprise

According to this ChangeWave Research study, summarized in PC World, there is some commotion in the corporate anthouses as more and more employees are using collaborative web technologies to get stuff done:

Overall, 39 percent of respondents said their firms are very or somewhat willing to use social software. In addition, among respondents whose organizations are already using such software, 35 percent said spending on it will rise in the next 90 days and just two percent said it will fall.

Twenty-six percent of companies currently using social software said they plan to invest most heavily in wikis, followed by blogs (15 percent), social networks (13 percent), mashups (5 percent), RSS feeds (5 percent) and collaborative tagging (3 percent).

I don’t know how you can invest a meaningful amount of dollars in RSS (other than hiring Blogging Consultants) but more importantly, I am not sure whether we should be seeing these number at this time.

If the transition of collaborative web tools into the enterprise is to have a meaningful impact, it has to occur at the grassroots level. No committees, projects or CxO involvement of any kind. These technologies are too young, and if the old wolves come and grab them, chances are they will SAPify them… make them serious, gray, bound by workflows and rules and processes.

Point to ponder: many organizations rooted in the Microsoft ecosystem use Sharepoint as their “wiki”. While I won’t dispute it’s a potent application, more often than not it resembles a static & dull intranet “page” without much employee involvement - it’s too easy for the site admin to disallow write access if he’s so inclined. Isn’t it safe to bet that a similar fate would await other technologies if they are officially adopted before they’ll have matured?

Additional reading

January 15, 2008 | Filed Under CRM 

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