Here’s a excellent post by Zeus Kerraval, a Research Manager at The Yankee Group, Lotus Knows Social Media, But Do Customers?:
I attended this year’s Lotusphere and, to no one,s surprise, one of the big themes of the show is social computing and its role in enterprise collaboration. IBM has been pushing the concept of what Lotus and social media can do through its “Lotus Knows” campaign, which I find to be fairly effective.
The concept of Lotus Knows is fairly simple–Use all of a company’s collaboration and social networking tools to help users connect to the right information or person in as short a period of time as possible. These tools are traditional collaboration tools such as e-mail, chat but also social media tools like wikis and blogs and, under IBM’s definition, extend to things like tagging of content in document sharing programs. In short, having a robust, human centric, collaboration strategy will help organizations “harness the power of the people”.
Now, this all sounds great and pretty simple, but as I listened to all of the customers that came up and spoke, I realized just how far we are from mass adoption. From the presentations and subsequent interviews at Lotusphere, I can summarize the drivers for adoption as follows…
- There is a groundswell of demand from the younger and more tech savvy of users, making it important to have some kind of plan in place to attract workers
- It’s an alternative way to reach customers that, if not available, will put the organization at a competitive disadvantage. Note that I didn’t say it’s a better way to reach customers, but an alternative for the customers that wish it. Better is a matter of preference.
- Collaboration is a key initiative for organizations. It’s important to put more tools in workers’ hands to enhance corporate collaboration.
The above drivers shouldn’t be a big surprise to anyone but I don’t feel these drivers alone are enough to achieve broader adoption. In fact, there seem to still be several factors that I feel could limit the size and the number of deployments over the next year
- Deploying organizations aren’t really sure how to drive adoption across the company.
- There’s a definite lack of a business case to prove the ROI of UC and social media.
- Companies struggle with how “social” to make social networking.
I think IBM did a great job of highlighting the value of social media at the 2010 edition of Lotusphere and I do think we’ll see more of it at other shows this year like VoiceCon.
However, we need to see more in the way of best practices and practical deployments that lead to rapid ROI to drive this industry past experimental adoption. So while Lotus may know a lot of things, it needs to translate what it knows into things businesses can grasp.
