The history of social networking

Are our companies prepared for the new world of work?

I want to recommend you the research note of Tom Austin, from Gartner (www.gartner.com), published on 30 march 2010, “Watchlist: Continuing Changes in the Nature of Work: 2010- 2020”, that is available at http://www.sourcingprofessional.nl/share/files/45_209935/watchlist_continuing_changes_1746021.pdf

I will not reproduce the content of this interesting article, of course, but I want to highlight 5 of 10 changes in the nature of work that Gartner predicts will occur in our enterprises:

1. De-routinization of work
2. Working with the collective
3. Work Sketch-Ups
4. Hyperconnected
5. My Place

And  the last message of the document: “The challenge for IT professionals concerned with supporting (or enhancing the performance of) high-value work is going to be in moving from the metaphors of the 1980s (Office Automation), 1990s (Groupware), 2000s (Enterprise 2.0) into a brave new world characterized by increased volatility, hyperconnectedness, swarming and more.”

Now, the question we have to answer is “has yet our company evolved from the office automation to groupware and enterprise 2.0 in order to be prepared for this new challenge?”

Characterization of Digital Economy (Information Society)

How do we can define the digital economy (or information society)?

Looking for material for my PhD thesis, I found a very interesting reference from Tapscott D. (“Growing Up Digital. The Rise of the Net Generation” – McGraw-Hill, 1998) who singles out the twelve themes of the digital economy:

• Orientation to knowledge, so that the new society is actually a society of knowledge
• Digitization, the new society is a digital society
• Virtualization, physical things can become virtual things, from virtual ballot boxes to virtual jobs, the “Message Maestro” business center, corporations, mininet companies, government bodies, offices, shops, populations, or beer
• Molecularization, the concept of “mass” is replaced by the concept of “molecularized”
• Internet work, the new society is operating through cluster networks
• Disintermediation, between consumers and producers
• Convergence, computing, communications, and content industries are converging to become the leading economic sector
• Innovative nature, thriving creativity
• “Presumption”, via customization combining production and consumption
• Immediacy, this becomes a key factor, timeliness is everything for businesses and success
• Globalization, the economy of the new society has a global scale
• Dissonance, discordance issues are rising due to unprecedented social conflicts

Of course you can find several more definitions of Information Society (I invite you to review “The nature of the modern Information Society”, a work of A.D. Elyakov) but I considered that proposed by Tapscott was interesting.

I hope you will agree.

2011 IT Trends for Business and Companies

2010 is ending, and so, it’s time to analyze the 2011 trends in different aspects.

In my case, I’m interested in all the aspects related with IT and Information Systems, obviously.

An to do this, I reviewed different sources of information to collect the predictions they propose for next year.

Here there are.

I marked a set  of them (bold in red) I consider that are more intertesting for enterprises and business, beyond the IT department and its management.

Computerworld’s 5 IT Trends For 2011

• The recession is transformational.
• The spotlight remains on cost saving technologies.
• Mobile is exploding.
• Software is undergoing rapid change.
• Enterprise 2.o will run it’s course.

2, 3 and 4 are talking about SaaS and Cloud Computing.
Mobility will be a must, and authors refer, too, to “alternative workspace management software” (http://www.peoplecube.com/solutions-hoteling.htm?source=ITTrendBlog_1010) to support flexible work programms.

IIFL: http://www.indiainfoline.com/Markets/News/Security-cloud-services-and-sustainability-to-be-three-most-important-trends-in-enterprise-IT-Ovu/5005526064

• Security
• Data Management
• Business Analytics
• Mobility
• Data Centre Transformation
• Cloud Services
• Collaboration
• Sustainability
• IT financial management
• Context-aware computing

ComputerWorld (Regev Yativ): Ten IT trends to watch in 2011
http://blogs.computerworld.com/17473/ten_it_trends_to_watch_in_2011

These are the

• Mobile computing remains important, exciting and risky
• Mix of in-house and outsourced services shifts
• Enterprise software begins migrating to the cloud
• Organizations embrace software lifecycle management
• Legacy modernization delivers much-sought ROEI
• The year of the better service level agreement (SLA)
• Graphical user interfaces get richer; maybe too much so
• Better performance comes to rich business applications
• Drowning in data, enterprises turn to BI
• Multi-tier architecture delivers the keys to integration

Trends 2 and 3 refers to SaaS and Cloud Computing.

eweek: IT Management: 10 Mobile Tech Trends to Watch into 2011: Gartner
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/IT-Management/10-Mobile-Tech-Trends-to-Watch-Into-2011-Gartner-493266/

2020Outlook: Top IT Trends for 2011 (Cascadia Capital LLC)
http://www.2020outlook.com/blog/2010/11/21/top-it-trends-for-2011/

• Increased competition between growth equity and strategic acquirers
• M&A, not IPOs, drive shareholder liquidity
• Web content management, analytics, marketing automation and customer relationship management (CRM) convergence
• SMB adoption of cloud services will drive consolidation of cloud vendors
• HIPPA compliance drives M&A for healthcare IT sector
• Technology enabled services companies become acquisition targets

And finally, let me refer to Gartner 2011 IT trends prediction (http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1454221), that were presented during its Symposium/ITxpo, in October:

• Cloud Computing
• Mobile Applications and Media Tablets
• Social Communications and Collaboration
• Social networking
• Social collaboration
• Social publishing
• Social feedback
• Video
• Next Generation Analytics
• Social Analytics
• Context-Aware Computing
• Storage Class Memory
• Ubiquitous Computing
• Fabric-Based Infrastructure and Computers

I include an image appeared in http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=1871 that resumes this 10 Gartner trends with a comparison between this year and next

As a personal contribution let me highlight main trends I consider companies should focus on:

• Cloud Computing
• Mobility
• Social networking (considering Enterprise 2.0)
• iProductivity (based on communication and collaboration)

And an another one that we want to focus, at Microsoft Innovation Center (www.micproductivity.com): Flexible Working and Flexible Offices