Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit

Notes from the Social Software in Enterprise Roundtable

The roundtable session had tremendous success. Far more people wanted to attend (sits were limited). Gartner had to organize two additional sessions to accommodate the demand.

Every company is looking at using social software in one form or another. Level of involvement varies from early experimentation to stories of real success. Commonly reported concerns and issues are lack of established processes and proliferation of products and solutions that do not work well together. General observation is that what is available on the market from commercial vendors or open source products doesn’t meet requirements of most companies.

Blogs

Most companies use blogs as a communication tool. It appears that blogs is the most adopted technology from the social software stack. And this is the only technology that that has true success stories. At least two companies reported that blogging technologies had become business critical. The most successful areas for using blog technologies are
• Sales and marketing for product promotion, supporting user communities and soliciting customer feedback
• Communication channel for upper (to a lesser degree mid) management to interact with employees and collect feedback (very often anonymous – this appears a big sell).
Generally, companies report greater use of blogs in the business communities than in IT. Also, according to IBM research only up to 20% of employees will use blogs actively. It is usually people in business or technical leadership positions or subject matter experts.

Wikis

Most companies consider using wiki technologies for simplifying content management, documentation and knowledge sharing. It looks like there is a significant drive for knowledge sharing even in organizations where policies and nature of business make it difficult to implement (e.g. private Swiss bank). Generally, adoption rate and demand for wikis is greater in IT. Business community appears a bit apprehensive about benefits and advantages of adopting wikis. Most success stories revolve around collaborative workspaces for distributed software development teams.

Social tagging

There is general lack of understanding what social tagging is and what it has to offer. Most companies are just curious about the phenomenon but don’t see real application in their business. Adoption rate is close to non-existent. Only one company reported piloting social tagging technology to help employees find information on corporate policies and guidelines. HR department is the main driving force behind the initiative. The stark difference here is IBM where adoption of social tagging in the workplace is relatively high. At least that is what they say about use of Dogear technology internally at IBM.