The FASTForward Blog » Forrester Includes Social Computing in Top 15 Technology Trends Enterprise Architects Should Watch: Enterprise 2.0 Blog: News, Coverage, and Commentary

Forrester Includes Social Computing in Top 15 Technology Trends Enterprise Architects Should Watch

by Bill Ives

October 9, 2009 at 10:39 am · Filed under Event Announcements

Forrester’s Alex Cullen recently released the report, The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch that they were nice to share with me. The summary states, “Forrester has identified 15 technologies with the greatest potential for business impact, and we’ve grouped these technologies into five themes: social computing for enterprises, process-centric information, restructured IT service platforms, Agile applications, and mobile as the new desktop.

I will look most closely at one theme, social computing for enterprises, in this post. Alex wrote that social computing — from member-driven communities to user-generated content — is becoming ubiquitous in our personal lives and business versions of these will become prevalent. I agree and think they already are but I may be talking to too many vendors. The key technology trends enabling this spread of social computing start with the fact that collaborative platforms are becoming social, or people centric is Alex’s words. I see constantly new vendors in this enterprise 2.0 space. At the same time established vendors, large and small, are adding social features to their tool sets. Since these tools need to be aligned with business processes to work, Alex notes that the organizational change requirements are high, even though the tools are relatively simple and the concepts familiar because of the wide spread use of their consumer Web cousins. These adoption challenges is one theme of this blog.

The next trend is integration of customer community platforms integrate with business apps. I see this in such concepts as social CRM. Once again the complexity is high because of the necessary alignment with business processes and strategy. Alex also notes that telepresence will gain widespread use and better enable video conferencing. This puts more of the social aspects of business into computing and away form physical meetings. This will be easier to do, especially with the budget reduction and green implications. It is also more of utility that requires less business process integration. I would add that other utilities such as micro-messaging (akaTwitter in the enterprise) will be easier to adopt for the same reason.

The useful report covers four other groups of themes. Several of the themes within them will also enable social computing such as the continued rise of cloud computing, the Web 2.0 enablement of BPM, and mobile as the new desktop. Many enterprise 2.0 apps are cloud based and mobile computing increases user-generated content.

Alex recommends that you develop your own technology watch list. I would agree and put a lot of social computing aspects in it. To read more about how Alex selected his technology watch list, read his blog post, Identifying The Technologies That Will Matter.

Share and Enjoy:

Permalink

35 Tweets

37 Comments »

Gil YehudaOctober 9th, 2009 at 3:03 pm

Bill,
I have noticed that when speaking to some in the EA crowd, even at companies that have a very high level of awareness about Enterprise 2.0, that EA folks sometime confuse terminology with Web 2.0 and Rich Internet Applications. The conversation will flow between collaboration features on an intranet portal, a consumer web site that allows user generated content, and AJAX or Flash code on a custom built web application. These three are quite different, and I encourage Enterprise Architects (a role that I was in for 7 years) to pay close attention to the different uses of these terms. Each are relevant, and for very different reasons.

Bill IvesOctober 11th, 2009 at 8:36 am

Gil

Excellent points. I wrote about part of this at Enterprise 2.0 is not Web 2.0 nor is it an Oxymoron http://billives.typepad.com/portals_and_km/2008/04/i-cross-posted.html Bill

billivesOctober 9th, 2009 at 10:43 am

Forrester Includes Social Computing in Top 15 Technology Trends Enterprise Architects Should Watch http://bit.ly/5fuDq