The Future of Enterprise2.0
Based on a recent Forrester report, Sarah Perez from ReadWriteWeb is anticipating a great future for Enterprise2.0 (but not without hurdles):
A new report released today by Forrester Research is predicting that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies is going to increase dramatically over the next five years. This increase will include more spending on social networking tools, mashups, and RSS, with the end result being a global enterprise market of $4.6 billion by the year 2013.
This change is not without its challenges. Although there is money to be made in the industry by vendors, Web 2.0 tools by their very nature are defined by commoditization; as is much of the new social media industry, a topic we touched on briefly here, when discussing how content has become a commodity.
For vendors specifically, there are 3 main challenges to becoming successful in this new industry, including:
- I.T. shops being wary of what they perceive as “consumer-grade” technology
- Ad-supported web tools generally have “free” as the starting point
- Web 2.0 tools will have to now compete in a space currently dominated by legacy enterprise software investments
Seems to me like the greatest challenge facing Enterprise2.0 adoption, the organizational culture, was left out of the report. Was it?
Larry Dignan also refers to the Forrester report and emphasis the future role of Social Networking within the enterprise:
The top spending categories aren’t all that surprising. For instance, social networking is a decent substitute for knowledge management applications, a category that companies haven’t quite cracked. In other words, social networking could yield ROI.