Enterprise Social Computing: What will happen in 2008?

January 4, 2008 at 10:44 am · Filed under Charles Armstrong, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Social Computing, Enterprise Software, Social Computing, Trampoline Systems

This is my maiden posting for FASTForward so I’d like to thank the organisers for inviting me to write here. I’m CEO of Trampoline Systems, an enterprise social computing business in London (UK). My background is in the social sciences and in particular the discipline of ethnography; so my interest is primarily in human and organisational factors rather than pure algorithms. Life as CEO of a high-growth technology startup is exciting but somewhat relentless, so my postings here will probably not be frequent. However I’ll do my best to comment on interesting trends and possibilities I observe in the course of speaking to customers and colleagues in the hope this will be of interest to FASTForward readers.

For this first post I’m going to pick out a handful of the developments I think will be significant in 2008. Obviously this is a mug’s game since humans have such a rotten record of predicting the future. But here goes:

1. Many companies will commission pilots of “Facebook for the enterprise”. Most will fail to deliver any value. The meteoric adoption of Facebook by corporate users during the first half of 2007 did more than anything else to boost executive consciousness of social networking. For vendors like Trampoline this has been enormously helpful. Previously most of our conversations had to start with an explanation of the basic concepts. Now we can generally get straight to discussing the business value. However in 2008 we’re also going to see some negative outcomes from the Facebook phenomenon. Executives who have witnessed the rise of consumer social networking and sensed it may have significant implications for their business may make a knee-jerk response and instruct their IT team to instal a pilot implementation of “Facebook for the enterprise”. Established vendors and new entrants alike will rush to offer products that either plug into Facebook itself or provide a carbon copy of the platform with increased security to meet enterprise needs. However a lot of these pilots will fail to deliver value and will be abandoned. There will be two reasons for the failures. First, they will be based on the incorrect assumption that social networking techniques which work well in the consumer world will be equally successful in the enterprise. In fact it’s clear that the value of social networking in the enterprise is radically different than in the consumer world and substantially different techniques are consequently required. Second, the pilots will too often be set up without connection to a pressing business problem. This means there will be little urgency around the use of the new tools and little benefit to employees from adopting them. Many pilots of this kind will see enthusiastic adoption by 5% of the user community whilst the other 95% takes little or no notice.
2. Microsoft Sharepoint will gain rapid adoption as a surrogate for social computing. In 2008 a lot of businesses will be interested in social computing but nervous about implementing unfamiliar technologies. Microsoft Sharepoint is ideally placed as a “safe haven” for such businesses. Sharepoint opens up a degree of emergent structure and collaboration without rocking the boat. It slots into the familiar Microsoft product universe. In its 2008 guise it even presses some “social” buttons with wiki and blog functionality (though I wonder how many businesses will actually use these). Some businesses will find that Sharepoint takes them as far as they want to go. Many others will find its limitations frustrating and will go on to implement fully-fledged social computing solutions. Either way Sharepoint adoption is going to sky-rocket during 2008.
3. The first social computing applications to target specific business problems will appear. Up to now  enterprise social computing has been limited to social networking platforms, blogs and wikis. These are all generic product categories with more-or-less universal application. 2008 will mark an important point of maturity in the sector with the launch of the first technologies that use social computing techniques to address specific business problems. These products will have little to do with social networking or content creation. Each one will be relevant only to a very specific vertical market or role. I don’t know what these applications will be and this is really my most speculative prediction; but I’ve got a strong hunch we’re going to see it happen during 2008.
4. “Enterprise Social Computing” will gain ground as an umbrella term alongside “Social Networking” and “Enterprise 2.0″. Words play a crucial role in the rise of any emerging technology. They provide handles that enable people to grasp and discuss unfamiliar ideas. They function as a useful shorthand for underlying phenomena that are often complex. Such terminology is inevitably in flux. As the technology develops and product categories begin to crystalise, new phrases emerge to describe the changing picture. There’s already been a slew of terms since 2000. “Social Software” was the first generic term used to describe blogs and wikis. “Web 2.0″ was coined by Tim O’Reilly as a wider description of the socialisation of the consumer web. Andrew McAfee defined “Enterprise 2.0″ to discuss how a parallel process would impact businesses systems. “Social Networking” is a long-standing academic term that took on a new meaning with the rise of Friendster, MySpace, LinkedIn and Facebook. Another academic term, “Social Graph”, came into general currency with the launch of OpenSocial. However none of these terms offers an umbrella description for the overall technology phenomenon and the need for such a term is growing rapidly. Over the last three months I’ve noticed a lot of people starting to use the phrases “Social Computing” and “Enterprise Social Computing”. These seem to be good umbrella terms and I find myself using them increasingly in preference to other terms. I suspect that Enterprise Social Computing will emerge during 2008 as a stable term for this new generation of business systems.

So those are my predictions for the next twelve months. All that remains is for me to wish FASTForward readers an exciting and rewarding year.

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