I’m currently at the Enterprise 2.0 conference in Boston along with 1000 other business and technology professionals. The conference is focused on collaborative technologies that increase innovation, productivity, and agility. Attendance is up 30% over last year and there is an evident “buzz” that some of these technologies are getting close to the tipping point where mass adoption takes hold. A plethora of tools and technologies are being discussed including Social Networking, Wikis, Blogs, Unified Communication, Presence, Mash Ups, RSS, Conferencing and many more.
I thought that I would provide a quick snapshot and summary of some of the hottest tools and technologies that are starting to get adopted:
Enterprise 2.0: What is “Enterprise 2.0″ exactly? I summarize it as follows: Enterprise 1.0 was command/control, serial approval processes, and centralized administration. Enterprise 2.0 is open control, parallel, and distributed administration. Quite a scary concept to many who are used to traditional business processes. Exciting to others who yearn to embrace these new tools for communication and collaboration to get work done more quickly and easily.
Social Networking: Blame myspace or Facebook, but “social networking” is one of the hottest topics in the technology arena right now as it morphs from the consumer market into the business arena. The whole idea for business is the dual concepts of the “wisdom of crowds” and the “network effect” — which boils down to the concept that all of us are smarter than any one of us. Social networks for business have been around since the first city markets. The difference today is that these technologies enable us to leverage the networks for our colleagues and friends in entirely new ways. These networks can be leveraged for technical expertise, partnerships, and competitive research.
Audio/Web Conferencing: Audio conferencing usage is up globally more than 25% year over year (that’s 40 Billion minutes). Web conferencing usage is up over 100%…with the market penetration being just 15%. Several trends are key to this usage: increased geographically dispersed teams, more partners and suppliers, an expansion of telecommuting initiatives as travel costs increase, and a relentless drive by business to get increased productivity out of their workers. It is web conferencing that continues to be a key enabler for collaboration, particularly as usage is going beyond online training, software demos, and marketing web seminars to usage by small teams. Groups of 4-8 workers are getting together on web conferences to “get work done” by working on shared documents together rather than getting into conference rooms or audio-only meetings where they just “talk” about work.
Wikis & Blogs: Wikis and Blogshave the same principle: allow many content contributors, open publishing access, and make it very easy to contribute. There are over 75 million Blogs now with over 3 million getting updated weekly. Wikis are exploding in businesses beyond the R&D department as Product Management, Marketing, and Sales look to share information and best practices. Most of these deployments are being done on a departmental basis versus from a centralized IT department. The most famous Wiki is Wikipedia, the biggest multilingual free-content encyclopedia on the Internet with over 7 million articles in 200 languages.
Mash Ups: Now that is a fun and nebulous term. Mash Ups is just a fancy way of saying “composite application” or “integrated application”. By software applications having common APIs (interfaces for talking to each other), they enable new integrated applications. Examples of mash ups include integrated audio and web conferencing, integrated Desktop Fax into instant messaging, and Google Maps. Premiere Global’s Communication Operating System is a case in point on open APIs (interfaces) that enable communication technologies to get integrated within business processes and systems.
These new collaborative technologies have taken flight within business and are going to fundamentally change how work is done in the office…on the road…at home…anywhere.
Tags: COS
