IBM's Alistair Rennie Talks Social Media Trends for 2011
Social media is no longer a college dorm room phenomenon. It has made it's way into corporate board rooms and is leveraged by brands of all shapes and sizes. The one area that some expect to see growth in the social space in within the enterprise.
Recently, I sat down with Alistair Rennie, general manager, Collaboration Solutions for IBM and chatted about his predictions in the space for 2011.
TR: How do you see 2011 shaping up in terms of the social enterprise? What trends can we expect to see?
Rennie: There's a transformation taking place. Every few years, there is a generational shift in computing style that leads to new opportunities and new business. The shift happening now is “Internet to Social.” First mainframes opened up a new way of working. The PC gave way to the Internet, and now the Internet world is giving way to Social.
Facebook has more than doubled in size in few short months, and is now at a half a billion users; and most workers keep an updated LinkedIn profile. And who doesn’t tweet their views on life and business daily, and even sometimes hourly? Social networking tools are quickly becoming a staple in the enterprise.
With the cultural embrace of social media and social networking, employees are demanding similar tools in the work place to help them be more effective, responsive and innovative within the context of the work they do. In fact, despite some management efforts to squash social software use at work, the real story is that more than half of U.S. workers use social technologies for business purposes at least once per week, according to IDC.
But the shift to embracing social is no longer about just blogs, wikis and tweets. Now, social software is fundamental to real work getting done. Social is fundamental to business. In 2011, we'll see widespread adoption of social in the enterprise as organizations understand the ROI that can be achieved, accompanied by the advances in mobility.
TR: What innovations should we expect see in 2011?
Rennie: You can expect to see social capabilities embedded into more and more business practices in an enterprise: social business process management, social analytics, social CRM. At IBM, our industry leading Connections platform is providing the backbone for collaboration for IBM's data analytics, performance management and business intelligence offerings. For example, Cognos now includes IBM's enterprise social capabilities in the core functionality of the software.
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