A recent article in eWeek points out that “digital natives — people who grew up using interactive Internet tools — will push the enterprise social software market to grow at a compound annual revenue growth of 41.7% through 2011,” according to Gartner analysts. You can see this trend playing out already – as Web 2.0 consumer applications transition to Enterprise 2.0 business use-cases – as a new, younger and more tech-savvy workforce is coming into corporations and demanding tools like wikis, blogs, RSS, instant messaging and social networking tools to do their jobs.
According to Gartner analyst Anthony Bradley, these digital natives “bring with them a set of expectations of how they will interact and the tools they’ll use to interact, and they can be woefully disappointed walking into organizations that don’t have some of the Web 2.0 tools that they’re used to using for building relationships and getting things done.” While traditional enterprise collaboration tools were fairly rigid and siloed in how they could be used and who could participate, these new Enterprise 2.0 technologies focus on flexible, informal and participatory interactions between workers. Like earlier findings by McKinsey and Forrester Research, the article highlights applications of social collaboration with Enterprise 2.0 tools that not only service internal employees and increase their productivity, but also facilitate interactions with customers, partners and suppliers.
Gartner analyst Tom Austin stresses that “businesses should especially pick social software that boosts the effectiveness of employees doing tasks that can’t be automated. These concepts include relating to each other, discovering threats and opportunities, innovating, teaming, leading, and learning.” As other analysts and industry thought leaders have pointed out, success with these technologies is a journey and not a destination. Austin points out that “enterprises can’t look at the Enterprise 2.0 evolution as a ‘build it and they will come’ phenomenon… Workers won’t naturally share information, sometimes due to compliance and security restraints, so businesses have to break down those barriers to sharing.” Read more
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