Spend $4 Billion? Do we really need to?
By Alex Manchester, Editor, The Internal Comms Hub (Australia), Melcrum
There was quite a lot of coverage last week on Forrester's new Enterprise 2.0 report, which states that corporate spending on blogs, wikis, RSS etc. could top $4 billion (internally and externally facing sites) in 2013.
Out of all the commentary on the topic, discussion on Euan Semple's blog and a column by Dennis Howlett seem to say it best.
"I find myself telling people more and more that if they are spending loads of money on this stuff they are almost certainly doing the wrong things."
And from Dennis Howlett:
"They [Forrester] make the implicit assumption that major players like IBM and Microsoft will subsume Web 2.0 software into existing collaborative offerings. They argue that a combination of factors such as commoditzation, legacy and the marketing muscle of the incumbents will serve to make Enterprise 2.0 products 'fade into the fabric of enterprise collaboration'.”
With all of the big software vendors gearing up and spewing forth collaborative software bolt-ons for their systems, you have to wonder if this is the way it's going to be. In 2006 and 2007 (perhaps looking back this was the time the first concrete suggestions for social media/software behind the firewall emerged), the overwhelming majority said that you don't need to spend fortunes on this technology. If there was one "rule" this was it: "Do it cheap".
Now, with the emergence of "Enterprise 2.0" and many people recognising the business value of social software tools, you can imagine the vendors licking their lips at the thought of other businesses needing yet another reason to spend lots of money.
Ultimately, many businesses are tied to the systems they have. Some of them are average, some are pretty good, some are fantastic. Whatever system you have it shouldn't necessarily mean you shouldn't look at some of the low-cost alternatives (Confluence, Wordpress etc), which can often do just as much if not more, and most of the open source/free/cheap applications are designed with the user and social software in mind – not adapted to do something, the way a lot of enterprise social software is.
Surely, testing out some free stuff on a secluded, secure server is easier to get approval for than a $100k system upgrade, not to mention less of a risk if it doesn't work.
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