The State of Social Collaboration


I'm back again at work after a long and very pleasant break. What better way is there to get back in work mode than to dig in to some new research reports? Here are some nuggets from a few recently published studies and reports on social collaboration:

In May, Avanade published the report "Global Survey: Is enterprise social collaboration living up to its promise?". The study aimed to investigate how companies are adapting to the shift towards a more collaborative approach to business. One of the key findings from the study is that "social collaboration is on the corporate agenda and the rate of new technology adoption is on the rise." Yet, the report concludes that "Business and IT decision makers have a false sense of accomplishment when it comes to social collaboration". According to the survey, the adoption of deployed enterprise social collaboration platforms is still quite low, and lower than decision makers think. In fact, the consumer social networking platforms Facebook and Twitter are the most commonly used platforms for social collaboration inside large companies. The reasons for this remain unknown.

According to a study commissioned by Microsoft and conducted by Ipsos, a growing number of employees want to use social networking to improve collaboration, productivity and knowledge sharing. But within a third of the surveyed organizations the IT department is a major road block, mainly due to security concerns. Interestingly, almost half of the 77 percent that request better collaboration tools are willing to spend their own money to get the tools they want.

On IDC's website, Vanessa Thompson discusses some of the findings from IDC's Social Business Survey from 2013. She notes that 79% of companies having deployed a corporate sponsored enterprise social network (ESN) and that "social capabilities penetrate the core business processes of an organization to become the "backbone" of workflow, social capabilities will no longer be called out as a separate component and will become inherent in how we get things done."

Finally, Aberdeen Group just recently announced that they will do a new study on Enterprise Social Collaboration. It will investigating the current state of collaboration in Human Capital Management, Marketing, Sales, Customer Care and Enterprise Mobility. The survey is live now - make sure to take the survey if you are interested in receiving the research reports as well as getting the opportunity take part of early findings from the study before anyone else does. Andrew Borg, Research Director for the Aberdeen Enterprise Mobility and Collaboration practice:
“It’s no secret that the way we work has changed considerably over the past ten years, whether it’s the rise of telecommuting, ubiquitous mobile connectivity, or simply a more geographically-distributed workforce, the traditional office environment that we once knew is a thing of the past...This study will examine the impact of effective team work across across several disciplines within an organization’s overall structure.”