Radicati Group, a leading analyst firm that tracks the messaging and collaboration industry, recently released some suprising data on the size and growth of the business social software market. According to Radicati, the market is expected to be $920 million this year and blossom to over $3.3 billion by 2011. These revenue numbers are staggering and indicate the significant investment that has started in Enterprise 2.0 technologies by business customers.
Gartner, Inc. analysts today highlighted the top 10 technologies and trends that will be strategic for most organizations in 2008:
American companies will spend $73 billion on knowledge management software this year and spending on content, search, portal, and collaboration technologies is expected to increase 16% in 2008, according to a recently-released report from AMR Research.
Knowledge management systems, which facilitate the aggregation and dissemination of a company’s collective intelligence, provide numerous benefits, including enabling innovation and improving process efficiency.
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Baseline and it sister publication, CIO Insight, have done several knowledge management case studies over the years. Here we invoke five that show how organizations of various shapes and sizes overcame the deployment challenges they faced.
Enterprise adoption of Web 2.0 tools and services is growing, and Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company (NM) is among the early adopters. The traditionally conservative company began investigating Web 2.0 in 2005 and has since deployed blogs and Really Simple Syndication (RSS) to its entire employee base of about 5,000. NM has seen improvements in corporate communications, team productivity, and worker productivity as a result. Like many firms though, NM has struggled to determine a hard ROI; questions about the further applicability of Web 2.0 to the enterprise still linger; and the company has seen strong, but not blockbuster, employee usage. For Web 2.0 technology marketers the Northwestern Mutual case holds valuable lessons.
When it comes to collaboration, many companies have a long way to go. “We are early in the cycle, maybe the second inning,” says David Smith, head of the human performance practice in North America for Accenture, a global consulting and technology services firm. “Companies are beginning to attack it. Very few are getting it right.”
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