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On social intranets, the evolutions thereof

Bit of a jotting pad post really this one. I noticed a Gartner report I’d completely missed (and a few of my peers in the Adoption 2.0 Council had too, I think Gartner are missing a trick here. Of note is this:

  • By 2010, more than 50 % of large scale companies will be using lifestreams and microblogs internaly.
  • By 2014, more than 20 % of all business communication is conducted primaly through social media.
  • Within the next three years, 70 % of all internal social media initiatives run by IT departments will fail.

Of note the last point. Yes, but. If a project is run only by IT then it will not have much of a chance of success. But the but is, it’s a truism that successful Enterprise 2.0 is itself a collaborative entity, it entails teamwork and collaboration between IT, Comms, often Marketing and HR and always in the final analysis, the senior management. Culture is key. Technology is secondary.

Two posts by Dion Hinchcliffe especially caught my eye. He’s been talking about the social intranet and change, introducing the concept of the Social Business Unit (SBU). Drawing on data from Gartner and CMS wire Dion charts the evolutionary forms of  the intranet and how these might coalesce and cohere in the formation of the SBU.

And yes, I can see both the evolutionary path and both the formation of the SBU as being integral, integrated, and yet. Can’t quite put my finger on it but it’s different in Europe and more so in the UK. Maybe it’s a different attitude to all things social both as marketing and as production / distribution but I feel the both the road and the journey are different this side of the pond.

Dion also mentions the McAfee and Purdue University report on the dangers of all things 2.0. Except that this one isn’t, well it isn’t about Enterprise 2.0. I’m starting to believe that using the 2.0 suffix for web 2.0 more productive alter ego was a big mistake. There’s such a tendency to conflate the too and use the risks of web 2.0 to tar the endeavours of Enterprise 2.0. No more did this come across than in a recent CMSWire piece that used all the worries of Web 2.0 to sell solutions on Information Rights Management (IRM) / Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM).

But what of the real world? Rightly, Dion points out that none of us in the Adoption 2.0 Council can seen show-stopping issues when it comes to Enterprise 2.0 and security. That’s not to say that they’re not issues, it’s just that they’re different ones. I’ll cover this off in a future post as it’s something I’ve spent quite some time going over with a fine-toothed comb these last 12 months or so.

Refs
Company intranets are turning social
Gartner Reveals Five Social Software Predictions for 2010 and Beyond
Social intranets: Enterprises grapple with internal change
Introducing The Social Business Unit
The Rise of Intranet 2.0: The Social Intranet
Security in the Enterprise 2.0 World: Conflicts of Collaboration

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