Forrester’s Alex Cullen recently released, The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch and they were nice to share with me. The summary states, “Forrester has identified 15 technologies with the greatest potential for business impact, and we’ve grouped these technologies into five themes: social computing for enterprises, process-centric information, restructured IT service platforms, Agile applications, and mobile as the new desktop. I am most interested in social computing for enterprises. Alex wrote that social computing — from member-driven communities to user-generated content — is becoming ubiquitous in our personal lives and business versions of these will become prevalent. I agree and think they already are but I may be talking to too many vendors.
The key technology trends enabling this spread of social computing start with the fact that collaborative platforms are becoming social, or people centric is Alex’s words. I see constantly new vendors in this enterprise 2.0 space such as CubeTree, ManyMoon, and Yakabod. At the same time established vendors, large and small, are adding more social features to their tool sets such as Sharepoint, Traction, and Socialtext. Since these tools need to be aligned with business processes to work, Alex notes that the organizational change requirements are high, even though the tools are relatively simple and the concepts familiar because of the wide spread use of their consumer Web cousins.
The next trend is integration of customer community platforms integrate with business apps. I see this in such concepts as social oriented CRM from companies like Helpstream and RightNow. Once again the complexity is high because of the necessary alignment with business processes and strategy. Alex also notes that telepresence will gain widespread use and better enable video conferencing. This puts more of the social aspects of business into computing and away form physical meetings. This will be easier to do, especially with the budget reduction and green implications. It is also more of utility that requires less business process integration. I would add that other utilities such as micro-messaging (akaTwitter in the enterprise) will be easier to adopt for the same reason.
The useful report covers four other groups of themes. Several of the themes within them will also enable social computing such as the continued rise of cloud computing, the Web 2.0 enablement of BPM, and mobile as the new desktop. Many enterprise 2.0 apps are cloud based and mobile computing increases user-generated content.
Alex recommends that you develop your own technology watch list. I would agree and put a lot of social computing aspects in it. To read more about how Alex selected his technology watch list, read his blog post, Identifying The Technologies That Will Matter.
The big difference between the corporate- or capitalistic-leaning sects and those of the recently and somewhat jokingly dubbed “edupunk” sect are in the underlying ideology of mashups, a do-it-yourself mentality, and above all affording learners and educators sufficient flexibility and opportunity to guide and discover their own learning paths. They thrive on open source technology, and the the notions of sharing and reuse.
www.onlineuniversalwork.com
Posted by: Gregory Williams | April 08, 2010 at 06:09 AM