The last few weeks
has been a chaotic time for me, with various vendor and end-user conferences
and events. We are also approaching the end of 2014, and in time-honoured
tradition, analysts far and wide are looking back at what's happened over the
last year, and dusting off the crystal balls to consider what lies ahead. At
MWD we've been putting the finishing touches to our own market outlook report
[Digital Enterprise Horizons, 2015+], and the process has made me realise
just how far the social collaboration market has come in the last year or so,
particularly in terms of its maturity and the way it is perceived by business
users and executives.
Over the last few
years, it's been interesting seeing how major vendors in this space such as IBM
and Jive have positioned what they do and what it's for; product marketing
collateral and conference themes have shifted from a technology-oriented
message which highlighted and emphasised their modern-ness/different-ness
through use of the word "social" , to a much more purpose- and
business-driven positioning where "social" is downplayed or avoided
altogether [see Are we finally seeing the death of 'social'?]. But more than just in the vendor positioning,
there has been a distinct shift this year in the way that adopters are
approaching this technology investment, whereby they are focusing much more
clearly on the business challenges that they want to address, rather than being
caught up in the hype and investing simply for fear of being left behind. We're
at a stage in the maturity of this area where few organisations have had no
exposure to social collaboration technologies at all; indeed if you expand that
to include content sharing tools (like Box, DropBox, etc) it's likely that most
organisations have some experience of these technologies, whether they are
aware of it (i.e. they are acknowledged/sanctioned by IT) or not. But where
content sharing tools are still seen as a headache that organisations need to
get to grips with, social collaboration - whether recognised by that specific
name or not - is now seen more as an opportunity; that is, people are
increasingly identifying with the need for change, or the advantages that it
can bring, rather than wondering what the technology does.
That's not to say
that every organisation is ready to embrace the necessary change at a strategic
level; most will continue to experiment with specific use cases in specific
parts of the business. But we are finally now able to talk about business needs
and business challenges more broadly, rather than focusing on @mentions or
hashtags.
It's an important
and very positive shift - not just for the industry trying to sell these
solutions, but also for the business community, since it increases the
likelihood that our investments will be worthwhile. You can only use technology
to solve a problem if you’re absolutely clear what the problem is you're trying
to solve.