Gartner’s (Hedged) Predictions About Social Business, Er, Technology

Gartner has released a report that says the social tools are moving fairly quickly into the world of business, and they make five extrapolations based on what is going on today:

via email (password protected report here)

1. By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

During the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts. Social networking will prove to be more effective than e-mail for certain business activities such as status updates and expertise location.

The press release makes no mention of instant messaging, oddly, which is widely used in many industries. But email is still the monster for corporate blurbage, despite the fact that “email is where knowledge goes to die,” as Bill French said.

I will wager that this will change as businesses shift to communications with their customers that are stream-oriented, and internal tools that are based on the open follower model: corporate publicy — open information sharing behind the firewall — will catch on in 2010 and 2011.

2. By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

Gartner might be a bit conservative, but not too much in this case. However, the right app showing up could shift this balance dramatically. The ‘business twitter’ apps I have seen so far do not provide the features that would make a compelling case for business adoption.

3. Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

When it comes to collaboration, IT organizations are accustomed to providing a technology platform (such as, e-mail, IM, Web conferencing) rather than delivering a social solution that targets specific business value. Through 2013, IT organizations will struggle with shifting from providing a platform to delivering a solution. This will result in over a 70 percent failure rate in IT-driven social media initiatives. Fifty percent of business-led social media initiatives will succeed, versus 20 percent of IT-driven initiatives.

Snap! The geeks in IT are historically disconnected to business realities, hiding in their server farms. Letting them drive these initiatives is risky. However, that means the vision for what need to happen — both technically and organizationally — will have to come from line of business thinkers, and Gartner thinks only 50% of those will succeed. I guess I would like to know how they generalize the notion of ‘success’.

I am a real fan of failing fast, which I don’t think Gartner is including in these measures. And it sounds like their recommendations are for big, soviet style monster deployments, instead of building small systems that work, and then growing them into bigger working systems:

Enterprises will need to develop entirely new skill sets around designing and delivering social media solutions. Until this happens, failure rates will remain high. A dearth of methods, technologies and tools will impede the design and delivery of social media solutions in the near term. But long term, enterprises will realize that social media is not a “hit or miss” activity naturally prone to high failure rates, and that a calculated approach to social media solution delivery must be an IT competency.

Except the IT guys are the wrong ones to be doing it, obviously.

4. Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.

This is a bit strange actually. iPhone and other mobile ‘computication’ devices (yes, computication is a new blend word: communication + computing) have had a major impact in 2008/2009. But in the near term we will be seeing augmented reality, widespread use of handhelds with video, and an obliteration of old ‘cell phone’ technologies like SMS.

But I don’t really buy that this will reconstruct the user experience of social tools on desktops or other less mobile devices, except that people will likely adopt goggles (a la iGlasses) as a desktop aid, too.

5. Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

Social network analysis is a useful methodology for examining the interaction patterns and information flows that occur among the people and groups in an organization, as well as among business partners and customers. However, when surveys are used for data collection, users may be reluctant to provide accurate responses. When automated tools perform the analysis, users may resent knowing that software is analyzing their behavior. For these reasons, social network analysis will remain an untapped source of insight in most organizations.

Before undertaking a social network analysis, Gartner recommends that the organization ensure that it has the trust and buy-in of the people it hopes to include in the analysis in advance. Issues of privacy and confidentiality must be addressed and a determination needs to be made regarding how the information will be used and communicated. Establishing the ground rules upfront will encourage more open and honest participation and reduce the resistance to ongoing relationship monitoring.

Hmmm. I need to write a longer post on ‘circles of trust’ but for the moment let me agree that getting buy-in on social network analysis is a necessity. In some countries, some sorts of social analysis may be illegal. Leaving aside the need to some degree of candor in answering questions, reading people’s emails and monitoring there instant messaging use — which might be extremely helpful for evaluating trust networks for example — can also stray into the surveillance of personal life side of things pretty fast.

Conclusions

I come away from these technological projections wanting more. Perhaps it’s because I don’t belive that you can discuss uptake of social tools without addressing the social impacts, because the value of these tools is measured by the changes they make in how we interact, not simply in speeding things up, or cutting costs. So if you don’t explore those social changes as deeply as you do the technology underpinnings or the economics of IT decisions then you are missing the biggest part of the equation.