by Bill Ives
April 14, 2011 at 3:49 am · Filed under
Adoption, Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Social Media
Forrester recently issued a new report, The State Of Collaboration Software Implementations: 2011 by TJ Keitt with Matthew Brown and Joseph Dang. The report noted that while organizations are actively investing in collaboration tools to support their increasingly decentralized workforce, 62% of companies say that these tools still mainly benefit travel and corporate communications. The reported noted that, “only 9% of businesses report that collaboration technology has impacted their time-to-market for new products, with improved innovation and partner relationships also ranking low on the list.” I was pleased to receive a review copy.
Why is this occurring? Forrester report author TJ Keitt offered this explanation. “The tipping point for gaining benefits related to flexible working styles is after a business deploys four or five collaboration technologies. But more collaboration technology alone isn’t a magic elixir. Collaboration pros must work in conjunction with the business to set policies that help information workers use these tools to do their jobs.” He adds, “To realize benefits of collaborative business processes, though, (implementations professionals) must work to integrate these tools into business processes like product development and workflows.”
This makes sense. If you are mainly using collaboration tools to support virtual conversations then travel reduction is likely the big benefit. To get the really big benefits in other areas you have to explicitly go there. You usually get what you ask for, at best.
This was the case with knowledge management. The only really successful KM efforts that I saw were ones that were aligned with business processes such as product development or customer service. In these aligned cases, I saw documented benefits such as reduced time to market, increase in successful cross selling and reductions in repeat calls on the same service issue.
Despite the limited returns, a significant number of firms still see the potential of collaboration technologies. According to the report, 46% of businesses reporting upgrades or net new implementations to team workspaces in the next year and 42% spending on social tools like blogs and wikis. Real time communication is being added to the desktop with new investments in desktop videoconferencing (33%), unified communications (32%), instant messaging (30%), and web conferencing (31%).
Let’s hope they target these investments at specific business processes and not simply general communication. There is more in the report to guide these efforts.
by Bill Ives
April 7, 2011 at 3:53 am · Filed under
IT Market
Forrester has released its current US Tech Market Outlook for 2011 and 2012. It projects 8% Growth in US IT Purchases in 2011 and 10% in 2012. Andrew Bartels provided this report with Ellen Daley and Sarah Musto. I was pleased to receive a review copy. These predictions were both slight increases from their thoughts in January where they had forecasted 7.4 percent for 2011 and 9.3 for 2012. Revising forecasts up is always in the right direction, especially with our economy.
The new report puts a number on these percentages, US business and government purchases of information and communications technology products and services will be $805 billion in 2011. Looking at the numbers by segment, software remains the largest part of the US IT market, at $219 billion. Telecommunications services come in at $197 billion. Communications equipment will be the third at $108 billion.
To explain this increased forecast, Andrew Bartels writes in his blog, “One reason is that…US economic growth still looks solid (as evidenced by the 216,000 increase in nonfarm payroll employment in March, 2011)… But more important is the strong momentum in business purchases of technology goods and services. 2010 growth in the US tech market turned out to be 8.9%, even better than the 8.4% growth we projected in April 2010.”
This is good news. I hope they are right. There is much more detail in the report, especially a very fine-tuned segment analysis.
by Bill Ives
April 4, 2011 at 6:47 pm · Filed under
Enterprise 2.0, Social Media
I recently read and reread an interesting post by Thierry de Baillon, Moving Beyond “Work as Usual” in a Complex World. We have moved from knowledge is power to knowledge sharing. This is a good thing but we need to go further as Thierry notes. Rather that summarize Thierry’s points, I have pulled out a few quotes from his excellent piece as I like his words. Then I offer a few of my own.
“On every subject, for every aspect of our life, the quantity of information available is so tantalizing, that we cannot simply store all information we need at some time into our memory anymore. Such abundance has transformed our cognitive process: we now mostly remember links and references to information, extending our memory map, our knowledge, to a network of peers and sources.”
“A recent attempt to deal with this growing quantity of knowledge flows is content curation… Unfortunately, …what is relevant to you isn’t necessarily so for someone else… Context is missing here. What we need is another way to filter information in context, another way to make information usable through non-deterministic tasks. The real power resides in knowledge use, not in knowledge sharing.”
“Business processes expect a deterministic output; they rely on repeatability and explicit workflows, which often proves itself far from the nature of human relationships. The cognitive process, instead, is a non-linear mechanism, able to make sense from disjointed information. Cognition doesn’t appeal for processes, but for patterns.”
“Business processes work as long as nothing changes, or at least changes slowly, which happens less and less in present business environments. Dynamic patterns, instead, are emergent phenomena of complex systems.”
Building on Thierry’s points, computers are good at dealing with pre-determined processes. People are much better at handling the unexpected. The dominant form of enterprise apps has been process centered, as Thierry pointed out at the beginning of his post. Efficiency was the guiding principle but that can take us only so far. Now we have social software that is designed to be people centric rather than process centric. Since more work now is project based, team workspaces become the new norm rather than process automation. People-centric software allows for better support for innovation, as well as the complex work we now face on a daily basis.
When I first got involved with knowledge management in the early 90s we created a hybrid version of work support applications. It was applied to such tasks as insurance underwriting and claims processing, as well as call center customer support. These are knowledge worker jobs but they follow some type of process. The knowledge support consisted on contextual access to knowledge e and experts. While it was process aligned, it was not designed to dictate what should be done but make the knowledge workers smarter. It did not dumb down the job as some process driven tools do. I liked the process-aligned type of knowledge management because it brought content to where it was needed to support decision making.
In some ways this was a transitional type of work support: both process and centered. We only called it knowledge management because that was the closest term of the time. Now we have better people centered tools and new terms. There is still a place for process in many work tasks but it needs to be supported by people centered tools. The balance has tipped away from letting the tools define the job to letting people’s practices define the job with tools in a supporting role.
One additional benefit from the people centered approach is that knowledge is captured as by product of doing the work. The new tools can help abstract that knowledge, make it accessible, and keep it current. This was a big burden of old school knowledge management.
