I’m an expert in this field.

Haven’t heard of the book, but I’ll check it out.

And, as a long-time management consultant for a large firm (not in IT, but in HR, org design and effectiveness) there’s an incredible amount of packaging often applied to common sense to make a viable business model, notably for the well-paid senior people.

I got tired (very) of selling the same (and inflexible) solutions all the time, as opposed to being able to say what I really think. My income has suffered, but that’s in many ways a different story

Ever heard of the book The Witch Doctors, about mgt. cnsulting and pundits ?

for the record, I basically agree with your (and Eric’s) conclusions, although one can never underestimate the ferocity of SPs (to borrow a term from Tom Cruise) to try to halt progress.

My objection is not with the conlcusion, but rather with the circuitous (seems too mild) path Forrester took to get there.

Yes, I think, as I noted above, that the use of social computing tools and services is effectively inescapable … computers are everywhere, on every work desk, there’s been ten years or more of increasing emphasis on usability and interoperability, the knowledge workers of tomorrow all use mobile devices and grow up with computers in school, thank Facebook and MySpace, etc. etc. etc. and so on.

Do you know the work of Wim Veen in Holland on “Homo Zappiens” (not Homo sapiens) ?

Greg .. it’s so funny to imagine that people other than professional analysts are reading, researching, thinking and may have valid and useful insights .. or that they can “crowdsource” or “mobsource” information from other aware and knowledgeable people and then do a good job with synthesis.

in all seriousness, this is part of the reason why I am such a huge fan of the new generation of “open” analyst firms, like Redmonk and Freeform Dynamics. The latter just released a really good report (free) with The Register on the topic of relieving the systems management burden to rival anything from Forrester/Gartner/IDC, etc…

It would certainly seem like the stars are all aligned for social software to hit the big time in the next 1-2 years.

Having been in the space for a while, I fully agree with their assessment that CIOs will not be able to quell the awakening happening as their employees are exposed to social tools on the public internet. Way to go Facebook!

Thanks for the post!

Eric

Nevertheless, my opinion is that social software and social computing tools and services will continue to spread into and throughout the workplace. I think the capabilities and dynamics are too intrinsic to the nature of knowledge work carried out in the midst of constant flows of information.

But let’s be clear … that is just an opinion on my part.

I’m surprised that this would come from Forrester.

BTW – they might be right, but that’s opinion and speculation, not “Research.”