Idea generation at some point involves someone moving knowledge from this group to that, or combining bits of knowledge across groups. Where brokerage is social capital, there should be evidence of brokerage associated with good ideas, and vice versa.
Allow me to note a top-down benefit for companies that excel at innovation. Boston Consulting Group (pdf) calculated that leading innovators generate 430 basis points more in shareholder return than do average companies. Put another way, if an average company were to return 7.7% on your investment, leading innovators would return 12.0%. As an investor, that’s pretty attractive.
And as an employee, being part of an innovation culture must be immensely satisfying.
On Wednesday, May 13, Oliver Young of Forrester Research and I will host a one-hour webinar, Tapping Communities to Accelerate Corporate Innovation. The session will cover strategies, practices and findings with regard to what leading companies are doing today to accelerate innovation. You can register by clicking the graphic to the right.
A topic we will address is the role and value of communities in increasing the number of good ideas generated for companies.
Which brings me back to Professor Burt, whom I quoted above. In his article, he discusses in-depth research he conducted on the Supply Chain Group for a major American electronics company. The results are eye-opening, and are compelling evidence for creating a common way for employees across a company to share ideas, knowledge and perspectives with one another.
Before discussing his findings, let’s go right to one of Professor Burt’s conclusions:
Thus, value accumulates as an idea moves through the social structure, each transmission from one group to another having the potential to add value. In this light, there is an incentive to define work situations such that people are forced to engage diverse ideas.
Brokerage Across Structural Holes
Professor Burt speaks in terms of “brokerage” and “structural holes”. The sociogram below depicts a typical social network structure:
There are essentially three nodes in this social network: A, B, C (+D). The structural holes exist between A and B, B and C & A and C. Notice the two actors. James is relatively “network constrained”. His social world really revolves around a tight core that all know one another. Robert is not constrained. He has ties into different groups, allowing him to tap non-redundant sources of information. Reaching across these social nodes is known as brokerage.
Professor Burt describes for levels of brokerage for which a person could create (increasing) value:
Make each side aware of the other’s interests and difficulties
Transfer best practices
Draw analogies between groups ostensibly irrelevant to one another
Synthesize beliefs and behaviors that combine elements of both groups
From simple to complex brokerage, there is value in making connections. Specifically, value in terms of the quality of ideas produced.
The High Correlation Between Idea Quality and Brokerage
The study of the supply chain group involved 673 managers. Professor Burt was given detailed access to the employees’ backgrounds, job titles, salaries, and performance reviews. He constructed the sociogram for the workers through online surveys, giving him information on which workers were network constrained, and which ones spanned structural holes. Basically, he had a wealth of variables to test.
And what did he test? The quality of the ideas submitted by these 673 workers. He asked each of them to answer this question:
From your perspective, what is the one thing that you would change to improve [the company's] supply chain management?
Let each employee provide their idea for how things could be approved. These ideas were then evaluated by two senior-level executives who had gained prominence for running the respective supply chains of their business units.
These rated ideas were then statistically analyzed against all those variables. What Professor Burt found was that there were general patterns to idea quality:
More senior managers provided better ideas
More educated managers provided better ideas
Managers in urban centers had better ideas
Yet within these variables that correlated to idea value, there was an overall trend that held true across the board. Those managers who were network constrained consistently scored lower in the idea evaluations. So even though the more educated employees had better ideas on average, within their ranks, there was clear difference between those who span the structural holes, and those who do not.
Bottom line: Connecting with those outside one’s closed network results in higher average quality of ideas.
Wrapping Up
I wrote earlier about the revenue advantage accruing to employees with more diverse internal social connections. That study looked at the revenue per employee generated, and was fundamentally a productivity measurement. This field research by Professor Burt introduces a new benefit for creating an enterprise-wide view of ideas proposed by employees. The ability for others to know about an idea, and to see the value and the application of that idea in their own realm.
By enabling communities to post, critique, collaborate on and refine ideas, companies are certain to reap the benefits of accelerated innovation. As Professor Burt puts it:
People connected to groups beyond their own can expect to find themselves delivering valuable ideas, seeming to be gifted with creativity. This is not creativity born of genius. It is creativity as an import-export business. An idea mundane in one group can be valuable insight in another.
There’s a lot more where that came from. Oliver Young and I look forward to seeing you at the webinar (registration link) on May 13 at 1:00 pm Eastern.
The enterprise 2.0 space saw good action this year. I’ve had a chance to see it up close, starting the year with BEA Systems (now Oracle) and closing out the year with Connectbeam. I think it’s fair to say that in 2007, social software was still something of a missionary sale. In 2008, company inquiries increased a lot. The burden still falls on the vendors to articulate business benefits, adoption strategies and use cases. But enterprise customers are now partners in this work.
So let’s get to it. Here are my top ten stories for the year:
1. Activity Streams
Facebook really got this going with its newsfeed, and FriendFeed took it to an art form with its lifestreaming service. In 2008, many vendors added activity streams to their applications: Connectbeam, BEA Systems, Atlassian, SocialText, Jive Software and others. Activity streams are great for improving awareness of colleagues’ activities, and adding a new searchable object: actions.
2. Forrester’s $4.6 Billion Forecast
Forrester Research made a splash with its forecast that Enterprise 2.0 will be a $4.6 billion market by 2013. The ReadWriteWeb story about it has been bookmarked to Del.icio.us 386 times and counting. Forrester’s projections provided a solid analytical framework for the different tools, used internally and externally. According to the analysis, social networking will be the most popular tool for companies. Whether you buy the forecast or not, they remain the best-known, most visible numbers to date.
3. Oracle Beehive
Larry Ellison is fond of essentially dismissing SaaS. He does not have Oracle invest much in the trend. But Oracle did seem to embrace Enterprise 2.0 in a big way this year with Beehive, which is an “integrated set of collaboration services.” The New York Times quotes Oracle EVP Chuck Rozwat: “It is a product we built from scratch over the last three years.” Now since Oracle is a huge enterprise software company, there’s plenty of skepticism about the capabilities and innovation of Beehive. But there’s no denying that Oracle has the ear of the enterprise, and picks up a lot of market intelligence through its customer base. While Beehive itself may or may not succeed, the idea that Oracle came out with Beehive was a big story.
4. AIIM/McKinsey Surveys
Research and consulting firms AIIM and McKinsey each came out with surveys of corporate interest in enterprise 2.0. The AIIM survey looked at levels of awareness and interest among different Enterprise 2.0 technologies. AIIM also took a fairly expansive view of social software. The top 3 “Enterprise 2.0″ technologies in terms of corporate awareness? Email, instant messaging, search. That’s actually a funny list, yet there are lessons there for vendors and consultants in the social software industry. If those are entrenched, can you play nicely with them? One other quote I like from the report:
This study of 441 end users found that a majority of organizations recognize Enterprise 2.0 as critical to the success of their business goals and objectives, but that most do not have a clear understanding of what Enterprise 2.0 is.
McKinsey’s survey of enterprises looked at the interest in various tools as well. It also asked respondents what the leading barriers were for success of social software initiatives. Top three were: (1) Lack of understanding for their financial return; (2) Company culture; (3) Insufficient incentives to adopt or experiment with the tools.
5. Facebook Co-Founder Leaves to Start an Enterprise 2.0 Company
Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and colleague Justin Rosenstein announced they were leaving the hot consumer social network to start a new company. The new company will “build an extensible enterprise productivity suite,” with the goal of “making companies themselves run better.” Why would these young guys, sitting on top of the leader in consumer social networking, choose to exit? As I wrote at the time:
The Enterprise 2.0 market is still quite nascent and fragmented. Combine that industry profile with projected spending in the category, and suddenly you understand why these guys are striking out on their own.
Assuming they’ll be able to tap the mother ship for help, I think this was a fairly important story this year.
6. Microblogging Enters the Enterprise
Joining wikis, blogs, social bookmarking and other incumbent tools this year was microblogging . Given the way Twitter is used by Enterprise 2.0 aficionados, and is enjoying skyrocketing popularity, it’s no surprise we started seeing microblogging emerge for internal use. At the mostly consumer-focused TechCrunch50, enterprise microblogging start-up Yammer won the top prize. Other start-ups in the category include SocialCast and Present.ly. SocialText added microblogging with its release of Signals.
7. Gartner Narrows its Criteria for Social Software
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is probably the iconic piece of analyst research. With its visibility and status, it also has enormous influence on vendor sales opportunities, especially when it comes time for IT buyers to draw up the all-important vendor short lists.
So it was with great interest when I read that Gartner had narrowed the criteria for whom it puts in the Magic Quadrant:
Added blogs and wikis to the functionality requirements
The effect of that is to establish those two tools as the de facto standard for enterprise social software inside the enterprise. To the extent corporate buyers are listening to Gartner for signals about the market, this will make it a bit more challenging for start-ups with interesting offerings that address other parts of the social software market. Yammer, for instance, won’t make it into their Magic Quadrant.
8. Enterprise RSS Fails to Take Off
RSS is one of those technologies that you know has huge value, and yet continues to struggle for awareness and adoption. Google tracks the leading “what is” searches. The fifth most popular on its list? “What is RSS?” Take that as both good and bad. Good that people want to know, bad that awareness continues to be a struggle.
Forrester analyst Oliver Young has a sharp write-up that shows enterprise RSS did not expand inside companies as many had thought it would this year. As he notes:
Of the three enterprise RSS vendors selling into this space at the start of 2008: KnowNow went out of business completely; NewsGator shifted focus and now leads with its Social Sites for SharePoint offering, while its Enterprise Server catches much less attention; and Attensa has been very quiet this year.
RSS is a great way to distribute content inside companies, but its ongoing limited adoption was a big non-story for the year.
9. IBM and Intel Issue Employee Social Media Guidelines
IBM and Intel each established guidelines for their employees who participate in social media. As I wrote, this essentially was a deputization of employees as brand managers out on the web. These market leaders were essentially saying, “have at it out there on blogs, social networks, Twitter, etc. But make sure you know the company’s expectations.” These guidelines represent a milestone in large enterprises’ comfort with social media. I expect we’ll see more of this in 2009.
10. The Recession
This affects all industries, globally, of course. And Enterprise 2.0 is no exception. Jive Software made news with its layoffs, but the effect was industry-wide. And of course, corporate buyers aren’t immune either. It’s a time for companies to hunker down, get slimmer, more focused and creative than they are in flush times. This recession will be a marvelous test for the resiliency of the Enterprise 2.0 sector.
Those are my ten. Did I miss a big story for 2008? Add your thoughts in the comments.
If you’re interested in tracking what happens in 2009, I encourage you to join the Enterprise 2.0 Room on FriendFeed. It is a centralized location for tweets and Del.icio.us bookmarks that specifically relate to Enterprise 2.0.
I did a Connectbeam webinar yesterday, Double the Value of Your Social Software. One thing about webinars is they really force you to crystallize your thinking, and you get to try out some cool new ideas. This one was a lot of fun for me. I enjoyed bringing some unconventional examples to the discussion.
So how exactly does one “double the value” of social software? The core of the argument is that integrating the various social software apps inside companies produces a new layer of value. In terms of how this happens, I developed three areas of focus:
Expand information’s reach
Create an employee skills database
Diversify and strengthen workers’ sources of information
The Slideshare below is the presentation I used in the webinar. Below the Slideshare, I describe the background and the three areas of focus.
“Enterprise Silos” 2.0
The great thing about companies rolling out the tools of Web 2.0 is that it lets people from everywhere contribute. Multiple people jump on wikis, blogs, microblogging, etc. Social software can tear down the departmental and geographic walls that separate employees.
So it’s ironic that these wall-busting apps end up as new walled gardens of participation. Employees update their Confluence wiki, they blog on Movable Type and Yammer away. But there’s no integration of the apps.
There’s a screaming need to pull these social software apps together. The folks over at venture capital firm Foundry Group laid out a nice investment theme with regard to Glue. A lot of the logic from that post applies to the proliferation of social software apps inside companies.
By connecting the different social software apps inside companies, companies will realize a new source of value from them, “doubling” their value.
With that, let’s look at the three new sources of value when you integrate these apps.
Expand Information’s Reach
It’s true that information is the key driver of success in the market today. That’s a truism, overplayed theme, I know.
But, it has had its effects inside companies. You see this theme played out in architectural decisions, such Service Oriented Architectures, which makes integrating data and processes much easier. Mashups are another area where we see this.
How about the consumers of data? How to optimize the creation, distribution and consumption of data inside the enterprise?
This is an area where Enterprise 2.0 can learn a lesson from the world of e-commerce. E-commerce companies work hard to optimize the finding and purchasing processes on their sites. Every extra step it takes to find something or to purchase it causes some percentage of consumers to drop out. So they work hard to provide a full, but easy experience.
How about applying that thinking to accessing the employee-generated content inside companies?
How to reduce the steps to accessing this content?
There are three components for what I’ll call an Information Reach Program:
Search
Serendipity
Notifications
Let’s take a look at those three components.
Search: A Forrester Research survey found that only 44% of employees can regularly find information on their corporate intranet. Meanwhile, Pew Research found that 87% of people can regularly find what they want on the Internet.
Where do you think employees will turn first for information? Now there’s nothing wrong with googling something. New information needs to be brought into the enterprise. It’s healthy and vital.
But the pendulum has swung too far toward looking externally, particularly with the rise employee-generated content. Thing likes social bookmarking, blogging and wikis are letting employees find and filter an array of great information. Yet it’s too easy to ignore.
One way to counteract that? Integrate employee-generated content with search engines. When an employees runs searches, they get their usual search results. But why not also show them related content from the company’s social software? Slide #12 in the Slideshare presentation shows Connectbeam’s example of that.
Serendipity: Also known as, finding useful information when you weren’t expecting it. Or as Dennis Howlett put it:
Serendipity: the 21st C word for ‘bloody good luck.
If search is purposeful, serendipity is passive, and in-the-flow of whatever else you’re doing. For serendipity to work, you have to expose people to a range of information during their activities. And let’s be honest – much of that information will score low on the usefulness scale.
But I argue that you need to cionsider serendipity from a portfolio perspective. If you can enable employees to be exposed to random information in high volumes, there will be cases of great matches between something a worker needs and a piece of information she wouldn’t normally see.
Key here is putting this information in-the-flow of daily work. If all employees do is watch a cascade of information, they’re not being very productive.
Notifications: “It’s not information overload. It’s filter failure.” says Clay Shirky. Search is purposeful, serendipity is luck. How about those nuggets of informaiton that you want to know, but aren’t actively searching for and miss during the course of the day? Notifications are the third component of the Information Reach Program.
Key here is to let people personalize their notifications, because people aren’t monolithic in their interests. Top down push processes diminish employees’ interest in tracking the data presented. Filter on groups (e.g. departments, projects, communities of interest), individuals and keywords. These go a long way toward answering Clay Shirky’s point about filter failure.
Create an Employee Skills Database
When you integrate the different social software apps, you can create rich set of data that well-describes what each employee knows and is working on.It’s not just your position and previous titles that matter – it’s your contributions, visible and accessible by all.
We’re seeing steps toward this approach on sites like LinkedIn, with its new apps platform. When you view a person on LinkedIn, you see more than their resume. You get a living, dynamic view of their work. Someday, all that content you’re piping into your LinkedIn profile should be searchable by others – beyond the current resume entries.
Same idea holds inside enterprises. If you could aggregate employees’ contributions across the social software apps, you have a much richer view of their skills, knowledge and interests than the typical corporate directory.
With Connectbeam, I was looking for a social bookmarking application. I ended up with a skills database.
Yes, that’s a Connectbeam plug. But the logic applies more broadly.
Diversify and Strengthen Workers’ Sources of Information
I’ve discussed previously on this blog a fantastic research paper that evaluated the power of employees’ social networks to affect productivity. Basically, the more diverse an employee’s sources of information, and the stronger her connections to a large number of peers, the more productive she is.
Now tie this idea in with Harvard professor Andrew McAfee’s thinking about employees’ Strong, Weak and Potential ties inside companies. Employees already maintain Strong ties inside companies. That’s the status quo out there.
The opportunity for companies is to work those Week and Potential ties. Move them closer to close ties. How?
Make employee contributions as findable as possible (i.e. expand information’s reach)
Associate activity and tags to individuals
Enable easy following of the activities of others
Fish where the fish are – put employee generated content where people do their work
Wrapping up
This webinar was a lot of fun, and I think you’ll notice some different thoughts than what is usually seen in these presentations. There are several ideas included in it that really merit exploration separately. I’ll probably do that on this blog, and over on the Connectbeam blog as well.
I had the opportunity to create and lead a presentation to Gartner last week, on behalf of my company Connectbeam. Now if you don’t about Gartner, the one thing to know is that Gartner’s analyses are used by organizations as decision criteria for purchases. Gartner affects how a lot of IT money gets spent.
So naturally, enterprise vendors are quite interested in how they are viewed by the respective Gartner analysts covering their sector. In fact, here’s how analyst relations strategy firm SageCircle describes it:
Gartner’s Magic Quadrant is probably the iconic piece of analyst research. With its visibility and status, it also has enormous influence on vendor sales opportunities, especially when it comes time for IT buyers to draw up the all-important vendor short lists.
The MQ focuses on two dimensions. Here’s a description of them from CMS Wire:
Ability to execute: This criteria measures an organization’s success at selling and supporting both its products and services from a global perspective
Completeness of vision: This criteria deals with a company’s potential and helps to separate the vendors who are focused solely on the short-term from the vendors who have a more long-term view of their market
Yes, it’s a simple graph. But so much magic occurs to determine where companies fall on the X and Y axes of the MQ. For reference, Forrester Research has its own version of this, called the Wave.
Presenting Connectbeam to Gartner
In my previous jobs in technology, I’d only been exposed to one major analyst briefing. I had the good fortune to sit in on BEA Systems briefing to Forrester about our portals and enterprise 2.0 offerings. That particular session, which lasted several hours, was led by the head of marketing for the Business Interaction Division, Jay Simons. Jay did a wonderful job leading the Forrester guys through the BEA product and roadmap.
But now for Connectbeam, it was on me. What should we present to Gartner? I hadn’t read any good information on the specifics of what points to make to Gartner. But I did remember some points from the BEA presentation several months back.
After the usual iterations, dead ends and inspirations that characterize presentation building, I settled on three core points:
Our latest release. Connectbeam recently GA’d Spotlight 3.0. Pretty important to talk about that.
Our roadmap and vision. I didn’t think about the MQ as I did this, it just seemed a natural for talking with industry thought leaders. Where are we heading?
Our customers. The idea here is that Gartner needs to know how you’re tracking. It turns out this was some of the most engaged conversation during our hour-long presentation.
The presentation seemed to go well. I personally enjoyed the chance to talk with these guys, because they’re smart and focused on the enterprise 2.0 sector. They just know stuff. Thanks to analyst Jeffrey Mann for tweeting about the meeting.
We originally anticipated two analysts from Gartner, ended up with four. It’s only now that I realize that the next enterprise social software Magic Quadrant is targeted for a 4th quarter release. Perhaps that’s why we had a larger attendance, but I’m not expecting Connectbeam to be in this MQ. We’re really just starting to maintain a dialogue with Gartner.
I know this is an area of focus for a lot of companies. Thought I’d share this experience, in case others are talking with Gartner or other firms. If you’re interested in talking more about it, feel free to connect with me through Twitter or LinkedIn (links are also on the right side of this blog).
In a recent post, Fred Wilson had this to say about Enterprise 2.0:
This is one of the reasons we’ve struggled so hard to invest in “enterprise 2.0″ at Union Square Ventures. We have tried pretty hard to find companies that we can invest in that bring the new web technologies to the enterprise, but often we’ve found what happens is that consumers (ie employees) bring the web technologies they use every day to work and they prefer that.
I understand the sentiment, but I’m not really agreeing with Fred on this one. Corporate employees don’t use their Gmail and Yahoo Mail in lieu of their company’s Microsoft Outlook application. It’s really a matter of making an application that solves some key issues and has an appropriate experience for what it needs to accomplish.
But Fred’s opinion is interesting in the context of Friday’s news that two key Facebook executives are leaving the company “to build an extensible enterprise productivity suite”. They plan to leverage many of the conventions of Facebook for this new company.
“Business software like that from Oracle, SAP, Microsoft etc makes a TON of money.”
“I know that when I talk about enterprise software the numbers of viewers just don’t show up. So, tech bloggers quickly learn that if they talk about enterprise software they aren’t going to get many advertising impressions.”
Michael Arrington of Techcrunch said the same thing in this tweet in April:
“@dahowlett enterprise is boring. no way around it. people just don’t care.”
Nick O’Neill wrote this about the Facebook execs’ departure:
“Apparently Rosenstein and Moskovitz are leaving to create an enterprise level productivity software package. Sounds thrilling doesn’t it?”
Rosenstein and Moskovitz are deeply ingrained at Facebook. They’ve been there for a while, and have seen it blossom as the go-to social network. They’ve were there for the heady valuation of $15 billion. The pre-IPO company still has work in front of it, but surely it’s pretty interesting.
So what do they do? They quit to go start a BORING enterprise software company.
What could this possibly tell us?
Entrepreneurship As Signal
Here’s one clue for why the Facebook guys would quit to start their own Enterprise 2.0 company:
Via ReadWriteWeb
Social networking inside the enterprise is expected to dominate spending in the category. And what is Facebook? The most successful consumer social network.
The Enterprise 2.0 market is still quite nascent and fragmented. Combine that industry profile with projected spending in the category, and suddenly you understand why these guys are striking out on their own.
It’s not an easy market to crack, and working inside the enterprise is much different from working out on the Web. Looking forward to watching their progress.
Forrester produced a well-covered report this week announcing that Enterprise 2.0 will be a $4.6 billion business by 2013. In my RSS feed of FriendFeed updates containing the term Enterprise 2.0, there were probably a couple hundred related to this report – Google Reader shares, bookmarks, Twitters, etc. Sarah Perez of ReadWriteWeb has a great post about the Forrester report, with dollar figures.
About a month ago, AIIM came out with its own report on the market for enterprise 2.0. It was a work produced in conjunction with the likes of Stowe Boyd and Andrew McAfee.
After reading both of these reports, it’s clear there is a common perspective out there, but some differences worth noting as well. It’s instructive to look at both.
Forrester: Projections Focus
Forrester is paid for its expertise and forecasting. Their reports are well-regarded in this regard. Based on surveys of over 2,200 companies, this report is a forecast of the dominant technologies of Enterprise 2.0. Grounded in the market, fueled by its analysts’ views.
Forrester’s report strongly cleaves the Enterprise world into internal facing and external facing uses.
AIIM: State of the Market Focus
AIIM’s goal seems to be more of an Enterprise 2.0 temperature check of companies today. Surveying 441 company representative, AIIM didn’t try to forecast the future so much as see where companies’ heads are today.
AIIM’s report addresses both internal and external uses, but generally blurs the discussion between the two.
No Unanimous View of Top Technologies
Forrester’s report considers seven different technologies for the Enterprise 2.0 space. AIIM’s report goes much deeper. AIIM’s respondents came up with a much larger set when asked the question, what technologies make up your definition of Enterprise 2.0? To compare the two analysts, I selected the top seven participant responses from the AIIM report. Here’s how Forrester and AIIM show the leading technologies of Enterprise 2.0:
Five technologies showed up consistently between the analyst reports:
Social networking
Wikis
RSS
Blogs
Mashups
It’s interesting to note the differences between the two reports. Forrester included podcasting as a leading area of spend for Enterprise 2.0. AIIM’s report includes podcasting as well, but survey participants didn’t include it very often in their current definitions of an Enterprise 2.0 platform.
Forrester’s report did not include social bookmarking and tagging, but AIIM did. The Forrester omission probably says something about their view of the dollars to be spent on it.
Forrester included widgets, which is a nod to their strong focus on external uses of Enterprise 2.0. AIIM’s respondents like collaborative filtering, which is the basis for recommendation engines.
A Few Thoughts
Social networking comes in strong on both analyst reports. Forrester has spending here running away from all others by 2013. Call this the Facebook effect (MySpace didn’t seem to inspire the same trend to the enterprise). Generally, Facebook controls its “borders” and has a handle on everything that’s going on. Relationships, groups and activities all occur within the walled garden. Enterprises share a lot of these characteristics. Social networks will become the next generation intranet.
Also, note the disparity here. Companies are just coming to terms with the idea of social networks for employees, while the blogosphere seems to have left the mainstream social networks behind. Call that difference between the easy freedom of thinking and conversations, and the hard decisions of where to spend money and sweating your stock price.
Wikis come in surprisingly low on the Forrester side of things. I say that because some of the best known uses of Web 2.0 technologies inside companies are wikis. In fact, wikis are the #1 thing that respondents consider to be Enterprise 2.0 in the AIIM survey. Perhaps they have a lower cost, so that the same number of implementations will result in lower dollars spent.
RSS comes in strong for both reports. That is great to see! RSS holds so much potential. Just look at the growth of FriendFeed to see how RSS can create really new and interesting applications. RSS inside the enterprise will increase information awareness, and can be a basis for research and discovery the way FriendFeed is on the consumer web.
Blogs are ranked highly in both reports. Very nice to see. There’s still a mountain to climb before employees get comfortable with them. For companies that do have adoption of employee blogs, I expect there will be a boost in innovation.
Company blogs are interesting animals. The worst way to roll those out is treat blogs as glorified press release vehicles. That would be a waste of time. But what do you put on a blog that would be interesting? A couple of companies serve as examples. Google’s blog has a very conversational style of its products, general technology issues and other geeky stuff. Cafepress’s blog talks a lot about their products, which could be boring as hell. But Cafepress manages to relate products to larger issues, which makes it a bit more interesting.
Mashups are in the lower end of the top 7 currently, although Forrester projects spend on mashup technology to be the second highest after social networks. Here’s where I think Enterprise 2.0 will lead Web 2.0: mashup adoption. There are so many existing “big iron” software systems inside companies, that rip-and-replace is an expensive undertaking when you want to add new functionality. Mashups extend the life of these systems. In the consumer web, we’re experimenting with mashups a la Yahoo Pipes and Microsoft Popfly. I’m not sure the average consumer is going to bother with those. However, the average IT professional very much wants to look at mashups.
Those are some general thoughts. What do you think about Enterprise 2.0?
Forrester 
