The study is the latest in the TechRadar series, Forrester’s research methodology used to predict the success of a set of related technologies over the next decade. The enterprise Web 2.0 analysis provides insight for two roles: Information & Knowledge Management professionals and Vendor Strategy professionals.
"Web 2.0 collaboration technologies solve problems that enterprises have today, but most companies have not used these tools anywhere near their potential" said Gil Yehuda, senior analyst, Forrester Research. "This new research illustrates to enterprise users where the smart money is invested and where to place their strategic bets. In the current economic climate, Forrester believes collaboration tools can save enterprises operation costs by getting people and processes together quickly and efficiently"
"While so much of the buzz around Web 2.0 has focused on the business-to-consumer market, the greatest opportunity today for vendors is in the business-to-business collaboration space" said Oliver Young, analyst, Forrester Research. "Some Web 2.0 collaboration technologies have shown a faster-than-normal life cycle, so it is critical for vendors to take stock of the enterprise tools that have the greatest long-term potential and invest wisely in those technologies"
Forrester previously estimated the enterprise Web 2.0 collaboration market will hit $1.8 billion by 2013. The enterprise Web 2.0 TechRadar study is based upon an analysis of previous research and interviews with industry experts, vendors responsible for building or implementing these technologies, and enterprise customers and users.
Forrester predicts the following Web 2.0 collaboration technologies will continue to experience growth:
o Social networks (cultural resistance exists, but Forrester believes this will eventually break)
o Wikis (users report success with Wiki endeavors, particularly when sponsored by business leaders)
o Blogging (social networks will breathe new life into internal blogs by providing more context to blogged content, but Forrester found that blogging alone does not capture the audience’s attention)
o RSS (underappreciated in the enterprise)
The following Web 2.0 technologies have large and resilient ecosystems, according to Forrester, and can last for several years or even decades, but over time, the markets will become highly consolidated, customer numbers will flatten, and revenues will level off or decline:
o Podcasting is on the decline. Users tell Forrester that podcasts in the context of enterprise productivity and collaboration are neither very engaging nor immersive, and the vendor landscape is shrinking.
o Forums are underused. While forums will continue on as a fundamental enabling technology for collaboration, the marketplace is flat, and forums will become part of larger community-focused packages.
View the full report Enterprise Web 2.0" and "Forrester TechRadar™ For Vendor Strategists: Enterprise Web 2.0" are currently available to Forrester RoleView™ clients and can be purchased directly at forrester.com.
Bill Ives agrees with most of the reports findings, but believes mashups should be listed with the social networking and wikis as “significant” successful technologies:
“In my discussions with vendors, mashups are being increasingly used as the application development platform underlying many tools,” says Ives in his post More from Forrester on the Future of Enterprise 2.0 Technologies. “So it is both getting harder to separate them and they are becoming more pervasive. I think social bookmarks provide a useful utility that is getting integrated into other tools.”
However, Bill cautions organizations who look at all or any of these tools as a stand-alone technology working in isolation.
“I see an increasing movement among vendors to provide integrated platforms that make use of a number of these tools. Even a very focus(ed) tool like Connectbeam combines social networking with social bookmarking and integrates it with search. Broader platforms like Traction make use of blogs, wikis, forums, and, most recently microblogging. Deki Wiki and Central Desktop combine many of these tools with a wiki platform under the covers.”
My study on Intranet 2.0 reveals similar findings about the adoption rate and usefulness of these technologies – and why some companies aren’t bothering to adopt them. If you want a full copy of the findings, you must complete the survey– even if you don’t have Web 2.0 / Intranet 2.0 tools your feedback is invaluable. To that end, make sure you please take 10 minutes to take the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and you’ll get a copy of the full results including the good, bad and learned lessons.
Once a
necessary evil, or completely ignored all together, employee communications is
becoming a vital discipline and corporate function at leading organizations.
“10 years
ago in employee communications I found that we were moving away from the
classic, traditional forms of employee communications… and to this new age that
we’re in: moving away from regional and cultural change into an age of new
commitment,” adds Keith. “And that new age of commitment means we have to use
listening tools better, we have to use the technology we have today better than
we have ever in the past. And that includes intranet technologies, as well as
other forms of digital and social media.”
The need
for better “listening” and communications could not be more starkly highlighted
in the Watson
Wyatt Communication ROI Study™.Among the findings, those companies that invest in employee
communications realize greater profits:
Companies that communicate
effectively have a 19.4 percent higher market premium than companies that
do not.
Shareholder returns for
organizations with the most effective communication were over 57 percent
higher over the last five years (2000-2004) than were returns for firms
with less effective communication.
Communication effectiveness
is a leading indicator of financial performance.
In
becoming effective employee communications cultures, technology including the
intranet and social media are becoming critical delivery and participation
channels.
“I
believe today that with the focus on authenticity, with the focus on new ways
of delivering communications… and social media… our world is dramatically
changing,” says Burton. “We have employees today, as an
example, who are receiving information both in the media as well as inside the
organization that influences their working different parts of the world.”
As for
the future, story-telling models and social media (Web 2.0 / Intranet 2.0)
might provide a sneak preview to the changes aheadin an increasingly important field.
“I think
the next 10-years will be dramatically different,” says Burton, who leads arguably the world’s
top agency dedicated to employee communications in Chicago-based Insidedge. “I think we’ll see more focus
around a grass-roots, bottom-up form of employee communications… rather than
the hierarchal communication. I think it will be populated more by the
story-telling model models that we seen in companies like Dow Chemical. We’ll
see organizations that have to bridge cultures better… in creating a
singularity in culture where employee communications is a very, very vital part
of that world.”
U.S.
President-elect Barack Obama’s to-do
list (from Gerry Flahive, The Globe and Mail (Canada):
1.Buy puppy.
2.Return You Don't Mess with the Zohan DVD to video store; ask for refund as
it kept skipping on special features.
3.Fix global economy.
4.Win war in Afghanistan.
5.Choose puppy name from short list: Carbon
Neutral, Alexis de Tocqueville or Mr. Giggles?
6Buy chew toy for puppy (or several?How fast do they go through these
things?)
7.Renew our historically strong ties with the
Dominion of Canada, asserting America's respect for its cultural and
political independence, and ever-so-delicately renegotiating only several small
clauses in the North American free-trade agreement, all the while assuring the
Canadians of our sincere goal of improving trade without harming that nation's
vital potash industry. (Canadians will laugh hysterically to this… the others
will scratch their heads. It’s a cultural thing).
8.Train puppy.
9.Find out if suede is considered
"presidential."
10.Send change-of-address form to post office.
11.Return the $150,000 worth of Nike basketball
shoes to the Democratic National Committee.
12.Change status on Face-book to "is now
president-elect."
13.Wean self slowly off Grecian Formula.
14.Buy more Purell Instant Hand Sanitizer.
15.Start work on
inaugural address; appropriate to mention puppy?
It goes
down the list to 44 items but rapidly becomes less amusing...
Here’s my (Toby Ward's) “Web to-do list” for President-elect Obama:
1-Facebook friend
invite Dick Cheney
2-Horrified by his
friends list, “remove” Dick Cheney from friends
3-Redesign the
country-western motif of the White House Intranet
4-Mapquest “Taco Bell”
with directions from 1600 Pennsylvania
Seriously,
intranets are boring. The Internet, is mildly more interesting There really is
a lot more to life…
It
occurred to me that while this blog / site is dedicated to business technology,
I’ve noticed interest in non-business related blogs (from time-to-time). So,
once in a blue moon I’m going to give you a little more insight into me and
“what makes me tick” so that you might be able to place a personality to the
individual that all-too-often is droning on about “2.0”, employee productivity,
engagement… blah, blah, blah.
So I’m
going to offer up a multi-part series on “What makes me tick” beginning with my
favorite songs. For my birthday this year, even though we’ve separated now, my
wife and daughters bought me an iPod. It was a fantastic gift, really, because
I’d forgotten how important music is in my life, in people’s lives in general,
and what an up-lifting and influential affect they can have on mood, attitude,
energy level, etc. So while it was difficult to narrow this list down to
something more manageable, and in no particular order, here are my all time
favorite songs:
Welcome to the Jungle - Guns
N’ Roses
ParadiseCity - Guns N’ Roses
Always on the Run – Lenny
Kravitz
Learning to Fly – Pink Floyd
Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd
So Lonely – Police
Message in a Bottle – Police
It Hasn’t Hit Me Yet – Blue
Rodeo
Little Bones – Tragically Hip
Bolero – Ravel
Blue Danube – Strauss
Alive – Pearl Jam
Red Mosquito – Pearl Jam
Evenflow – Pearl Jam
It’s the End of the World –
REM
Only the Good Die Young –
Billy Joel
Chan Chan – Buena Vista Social Club
Definition – Kruder &
Dorfmeiseter
Walk on the Ocean – Toad the
Wet Sprocket
Little Heaven – Toad the Wet
Sprocket
Kind of Blue – Miles Davis
Pride – U2
Mass Romantic – New Pornographers
When I Come Around – Green
Day
As Baile – Enya
LA Woman – The Doors
Sweet Emotion – Aerosmith
All Along the Watchtower –
Jimi Hendrix
Bad Moon Rising – CCR
Back Door – CCR
You’re Nobody Till Somebody
Loves You – Dean Martin
Bring the Noise – Public
Enemy
Can I Kick It – Tribe Called
Quest
Enjoy the Silence – Depeche
Mode
Blind Faith – New Order
Honorable
mentions (just missed out, but I couldn’t pick just one song):
Collective Soul (too many to
list)
Gin Blossoms (anything off
the 1st album)
Public Enemy (most anything
from first 4 albums)
Sarah McLachlan (my
neighbour)
Odds (played my high school)
54-40 (went to my high
school)
Stone Roses
Oasis
Velvet Revolver
Beatles
Mark Isham
Celine Dion (ha ha, just
kidding )
Feel free
to post your own favorites below… or to disagree with me by posting below. Part II next week on my favorite books.
“The Web
content management market is mature and expanding,” says Gartner’s latest
MarketScope for Web Content Management (MacComascaigh, Gilbert, Bell, Shegda, Andrews). “Vendor
consolidation has fallen (slowed)… functions such as workflow, ease of use and
multi-site management are no longer differentiating factors; they are the
norm.”
Findings:
Open source solutions (OSS, represents only 3% of the
total WCM market) are increasingly stable, robust and growing in market
share
Web 2.0 phenomenon is driving
WCM innovation
Change management and user
adoption will need to be applied to both internal and external users
The total WCM market, at $750
million per year, will grow at an annual rate of 15% through 2012
(representing 25% of the total ECM market)
Recommendations
for implementing a new WCM system (CMS):
Develop specific business
goals and link these to business objectives
Understand the cultural shift
represented by Web 2.0
Interoperability (multiple
systems working together or migrating from one to another) needs to be
considered, as does rationalization of multiple WCMs
Hosted SaaS solutions are not
growing as fast due to business and technical reasons
Total cost (TCO) of OSS solutions should take into
account initial price tag
Highest
rated vendors (strong positive):
Interwoven
Ektron
Lowest
rated vendors (caution advisories):
IBM (Lotus)
Mediasurface
Also of
note:
Vignette gets a positive
rating but with caution due their financial performance (also read Vignette
still in transition)
Microsoft SharePoint (MOSS)
is listed as a very average “promising” with lots of caveats and listed
weaknesses (see What the experts say about SharePoint (MOSS)
Gartner estimates a typical
replace of a WCM system to be around 5 years
My
analysis:
Gartner’s
MarketScope is somewhat different from the average Magic Quadrant in that the
qualifying vendors must have $10 million in licensing revenue to qualify, and
there is no magic quadrant but rather a 5-point rating scale:
Strong negative
Caution
Promising
Positive
Strong positive
While
there are hundreds of WCM solutions (thousands, really) only 17 qualify.
The
report is concise and solid intelligence for a representative snapshot look at
the current marketplace. This report is a good starting point to understanding
the market, but is not an adequate tool for helping an organization select a CMS. If you have significant
experience with WCM (CMS) and have very detailed and documented requirements and
plans for WCM, then a better report is the CMS Watch Web CMS Report 2009. If you
don’t have a solid understanding of the market and solutions, and what to watch
out for then you better consider Prescient’s CMS
Blueprint service.
Additional
notes on vendors:
Interwoven – Though due for a major tech upgrade, I
like how Interwoven has evolved in the past couple of years. The updated, AJAX-powered
U; the campaign management functions, etc. This is a
very powerful system, but overkill for an intranet… it’s sweet spot is the
external, product marketing website.
EPiServer – the Swedish-based
vendor is a real up-and-comer – and it’s average contract value is below
$10,000 which gives all the others a run for its money.
IBM (Lotus) – despite its
caution rating, this is still a reasonable solution… if you’re a Lotus
shop and/or use WebSphere. Outside that, there are far too many good-looking
alternatives.
Microsoft – I think it’s
generous to label SharePoint (MOSS) as WCM. It really is a portal /
development platform that is really quite weak bang-for-the-buck for WCM.
Garter cites its weaknesses particularly “ease of content reuse, multisite
management, workflow and enterprise-level federation capabilities such as
replication and multi-farm synchronization.” MOSS is a good enterprise
portal solution in a small to medium-size organization.
What is
absent:
The Content
Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) specification or standard was
ignored in this report.CMIS defines a
model or framework ensuring that content can be used by one or more Enterprise
Content Management repositories or systems. Frankly, I wouldn’t buy a WCM (CMS) if the selling vendor hasn’t
agreed to implement this standard.
