May 6th, 2009
NEXT09: Where are we in the social enterprise?
Stowe Boyd, who with our own Oliver Marks has been researching thinking around the social enterprise presented fragments from their findings at NEXT09. The full results will be made available at the upcoming Enterprise 2.0 event. Much of what has been done so far is qualitative with snippets that provide partial insights into what’s happening at large companies like Intel and P&G.
I stitched together some video segments from Stowe’s presentation that talk about the role of leadership, open-ness, gatekeeping and adoption. The video includes material from Jeremiah Owyang, analyst at Forrester and Charlene Li of Altimeter.
It is interesting to note that running through much of what was said is the acknowledgment that adoption and change will be a lot harder and take much more time than many of the early social enterprise enthusiasts thought. As Charlene says: “It’s hard.”
Several weeks ago I questioned whether the promise of Enterprise 2.0 would ever materialize. Despite the measured enthusiasm evident in Stowe’s presentation, nothing I heard has changed my opinion. Stowe went as far as saying that it may take ten years before the vision of an open, collaborative enterprise is in common existence.
Ten years is an eternity in tech terms and with the pace of innovation showing no real sign of slowing, one has to wonder whether what we see today as the building blocks for the social enterprise: blogs, wikis and so on, will exist as such in that same time frame. Even so, it is good to see the threads of discussion around the elements of the social enterprise being surfaced and coming together in a coherent manner.
As an aside, during his presentation, Stowe said that with the exception of Twitter, no product names stand out, only categories. That suggests despite the best efforts of vendors like SixApart in the blog space and Atlassian in wikis, no one company is truly capturing the imagination of business as a whole. Including Microsoft. That should raise a few eyebrows.
The video runs 5 mins 35 seconds.
Dennis Howlett has been providing comment and analysis on enterprise software since 1991. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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