Why should any enterprise have social software on its technology radar?

Mike Gotta: For the past several years, organizations have invested a tremendous amount of time, money, and resources on projects and technologies to help automate business processes and improve how information is managed. However, clients tell us that there are still many business activities that cannot be fully automated. These activities rely on people, often in a group context, to collectively share information and make decisions.

Our research indicates that business strategists are paying more attention to the influence that teams and communities have on how well enterprises perform and innovate. Improving performance and innovation, in turn, helps organizations meet their objectives in terms of growth, competitiveness, and delivering value to customers. Social software has its roots in the consumer market. What makes it of interest to enterprises is that it represents a different design perspective around groups and social networks. Burton Group believes that this is an important distinction.

What are the tangible benefits?

Mike Gotta: Many experts associate social software with specific types of tools, such as blogs, wikis, tagging, and social bookmark services. It is really more about designing software around user group experience that can be linked or combined with other applications. Social software encourages informal interaction and helps people self-organize information based on community participation and insight.

Enterprises should have social software on their technology radar screens because it promises to help technologists design better environments that improve how groups (such as teams and communities) perform and innovate. The important thing to remember though is that social software represents a different way of looking at how to design systems that improve the ways people communicate, share information, and collaborate.

How can social software help organisations especially within their knowledge and learning processes?


Mike Gotta: One of the key design aspects of social software is its emphasis on expanding informal interaction and conversation. If you look at blogs, wikis, tagging, and social bookmark services, it enables people to collectively gather and exchange information and insight in a manner that democratizes the workplace. This does not mean that formal institutions around knowledge management practices and learning methods should be replaced.

Social software should be viewed as something that augments existing structures and processes around distance learning, enterprise taxonomies, and enterprise content management. People learn best in the context of their work and often through peer interaction. Social software focuses on "the edge" and provides a balance to more formalized sets of processes.

Tangible benefits are difficult at this time to ascertain since the technologies are primarily consumer-oriented or do not have an extended track record within enterprises. Many of the promised benefits are more qualitative as well, so there is a degree of subjectivity when it comes to ROI. There are examples where enterprises have deployed blogs and wikis internally and have achieved measurable benefits when they implemented these tools around specific applications such as competitive intelligence and program or project management.

Despite these benefits, tools like blogs, wikis, tagging, bookmarking services, etc. haven't found their way into enterprises on a broader scale. Why not?

Mike Gotta: There are some vendors who have gained some penetration into the enterprise software market. Traction Software comes to mind for blogs, and Socialtext comes to mind for wikis. There are other best-of-breed vendors as well. And there are open source options for companies as well, especially for wikis. But for the most part, the technology has not yet been pushed by a major enterprise software vendor. This will change.


Microsoft will include blog and wiki capabilities within Office 2007, and IBM has demonstrated similar capabilities within its Notes/Domino platform. IBM also has an internal solution called dogear (which is a tagging and social bookmark application) that will likely be productized within a year. Microsoft also recently announced Knowledge Network, which adds expertise and social networking capabilities to SharePoint.

There are a lot of tools - most of them free - but practically no professional services or business cases. Where do you see options for the market?

Mike Gotta: Social networking remains an area where professional services do exist. Companies like IBM have incorporated social networking analysis (SNA) into their business consulting practices, and there are many specialists in the field of SNA, too. When blogs are used for marketing and public relations, then firms are available to provide professional services as well. So it seems that professional services are related to how these tools are applied. I would expect that to remain the norm. Professional services will be solution-focused, and these tools are just incorporated into existing practices.

Who could be the players that make the big business? Will the giants just integrate some social applications into their architectures or is there a market for specialized niche players as well?

Mike Gotta: Since I cover the enterprise market, I can only address that domain as opposed to the consumer market. Right now there is an opportunity for best-of-breed vendors that specialize in the tools associated with social software, but as vendors such as IBM and Microsoft generalize the technology into common infrastructure, I would expect these vendors to focus more on applications that extend that infrastructure rather than on trying to compete at the infrastructure layer.

Similar trends have occurred in other markets, such as enterprise portals and enterprise content management, where you see best-of-breed vendors increasingly under pressure as once-specialized technology becomes commoditized as general infrastructure. The key for these vendors will be to transition to a focus on applications and vertical solutions over time or specific infrastructure services that extend what major vendors provide as a core framework.

Is a more professional applications market on the horizon?

Mike Gotta: If you mean applications focused on specific roles, processes, or vertical business, then yes. You can already see this with some vendors. Contact Networks, for instance, has a social networking platform that targets sales and has recently expanded its focus to professional services and legal. As another example, Traction Software has targeted competitive intelligence as one professional application with its social software tools.

What's your advice to enterprises that do not want to wait for mainstream but believe in the competitive advantage of being a first mover: What is critical in implementing social software today? Any pitfalls?

Mike Gotta: There are detailed descriptions in the recommendation section of our report. The most important points are:

• Governance is the most critical component of success. If your culture and organization are not ready for informal, community-centric practices to improve communication, information sharing, and collaboration, then social software will likely fail in a general sense, though it may still succeed if it is narrowly applied around specific applications.
• Include groups involved in organizational development and human capital management. This is necessary due to the culture issues.
• I would probably not want to see more than 3-5 pilots going on at the same time. Some social software tools are more mature (blogs, wikis) while others are still emergent (tagging, social bookmark services, social networking).
• Expect a short lifecycle for any investment. Continue to monitor the market and the maturity of the technology. Do not standardize too fast on any single vendor. Make sure you investigate and document both project success and failure.

Your visionary statement for the year 2010: How will we be working in and with Web 2.0 ?


Mike Gotta: By 2010, I expect we will see a new breed of technologist who fully understands how to design and implement systems that focuses on groups, their relationships, their interactivities, and the networks that connect them.

Such systems and environments will be service-oriented, with well-defined meta-models and metadata, enabling them to be integrated with a variety of applications, such as workflow or decision-support systems. They might also be extended in ways not conceived by the original designers - much like mashups are today - as groups construct their own personal team or community spaces (ala Myspace) to interact, share information or collaborate on work activities.