Eye on Messaging
Social Networks Versus Email
Widgets & RSS FeedsAs part of its preparations for Gartner Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit 2010 held earlier this month in Baltimore, Gartner analysts shared predictions on the use of social software and collaboration in the enterprise.
“A lot has happened in a year within the social software and collaboration space, observes Mark R. Gilbert, research vice president at Gartner and co-chair of the Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit. “The growing use of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook by business users has resulted in serious enterprise dialogue about procuring social software platforms for the business.”
One of the key predictions that Gartner makes is that the greater availability of social networking services both inside and outside the firewall, coupled with changing demographics and work styles, will lead 20 percent of users to make a social network the hub of their business communications by 2014. Analysts think that during the next several years, most companies will be building out internal social networks and/or allowing business use of personal social network accounts.
Organizations are already finding ways to integrate social networking into marketing efforts and communications, so it makes sense that social networking will become more relied upon for business activities over email.
“The rigid distinction between email and social networks will erode. Email will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer email capabilities,” expects Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner. “While email is already almost fully penetrated in the corporate space, we expect to see steep growth rates for sales of premises- and cloud-based social networking services.”
Other research seems to confirm Gartner’s prediction. Keith R. Crosley, director of market development for Proofpoint, Inc. is one who does not dispute the finding. “In some rather informal research we conducted last year, Proofpoint found that more than half of UK workers and more than 40 percent of U.S. workers use social media platforms more than email in their personal lives,” he says. “About 10 percent of UK and 7 percent of U.S. workers said they already use social media platforms more than email in their professional lives. So it’s not much of a stretch to see this trend continuing to encompass 20 percent of business users in the next 4 years.”
But with the coming reliance on social networks, will the security of the channel be ready? Crosley believes that it will. “Over the next four years, I think that the security risks associated with social media platforms will be both better understood and better addressed. It’s reasonable to assume that they will be mature enough from a security standpoint.”
In addition, Crosley notes that like email, many of the risks associated with social media have both a policy and technology dimension and will continue to be fairly complex. “I’m thinking of data loss risks, acceptable use and related policy issues.”
Gartner is in agreement. As part of the prediction, Gilbert expects that
success in social software and collaboration will require a concerted and
collaborative effort between IT and business units. Gartner recommends that
organizations develop a long-term strategy for provisioning and consuming a
rich set of collaboration and social software services, and develop policies
governing the use of consumer services for business purposes.
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Eye on Messaging is written by Stephanie Jordan, editor in chief of Messaging News. If you have story ideas or news to share, email her: sjordan [at] messagingnews [dot] com
Email & Productivity
According to IT research firm Gartner, non-work-related Internet surfing results in an estimated 40 percent productivity loss each year for American businesses. While the Web surfing productivity drain is a loss to the company, there is another less talked about productivity drain that can directly hurt individual employees: the email inbox.
Marsha Egan, CEO of The Egan Group, Inc. — an executive and life coaching firm — is the author of Inbox Detox and the Habit of E-mail Excellence, a book that helps employees and executives examine and improve their email habits to save time and increase productivity. Egan challenges workers (and businesses) to admit that they have poor email habits.
“Email is a very effective communication tool upon which businesses rely heavily,” says Egan. “However, we have developed a dependency on email that saps productivity. Many people can’t keep up with their inbox and simply declare email bankruptcy.”
Egan points to statistics that show many employees check work email over weekends and while on vacation. “It’s clear that in the new decade, email users must take control their email before it controls them,” she declares. Egan asserts that between reading, responding, and recovery time, the average email interruption takes four minutes of valuable work time. “If a worker receives an average of 15 email interruptions per day, one hour of time is lost to email interruptions. If that worker is part of a 20-person department, 20 hours of work time are lost per day. Then, if the employees average $20 USD per hour, the company loses $2000 USD per week due to a loss of worker productivity.”
Egan believes that without healthy email habits, the problems will only get worse. While seemly simple, there are a few steps that Egan recommends:
Place the main point, assignment, or request in the first two lines of the email. People have a tendency to build up to a conclusion when they write. At times, this habit makes it very difficult for email readers to figure out what the main issue or request is. By putting your main point in the first two sentences, you can avoid misinterpretations and get readers focused on exactly what you want, right from the get-go.
Keep emails short. When you send short, easy-to-read messages, people will respond in the same manner and you save incredible amounts of time sorting through your inbox.
Send less email. While this may seem a no-brainer, email begets email. Consider your alternatives. In many cases, it is better and easier to pick up the phone, visit the would-be recipient’s desk, or simply not respond.
“There is a cure for our current email e-ddiction,” Egan says. “If you practice productive email habits, you will not only loosen the grip email has on you, but you will also reclaim hours of productive time every day.”
More on increasing email productivity can be found on her website and her blog.
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Eye on Messaging is written by Stephanie Jordan, editor in chief of Messaging News. If you have story ideas or news to share, email her: sjordan [at] messagingnews [dot] com
User Adoption Strategies for Collaboration Tools
I’m heading to Europe in March to attend and speak at IntraTeam Event 2010, the annual Intranet conference in Copenhagen. While global warming won’t be on the agenda, lots of intranet and collaboration topics will be! I am presenting a pre-conference workshop on User Adoption Strategies, and conference keynote on Frameworks for Evaluating Collaboration Tools. I’m really looking forward to it. Will you be there?
As part of my preparation for the workshop specifically, and in relation to a variety of other projects more generally, I am doing a lot of work around user adoption strategies for collaboration tools at the moment. User adoption is the essential stage whereby you put an intentional focus on encouraging people to adopt the new collaboration tool — Lotus Connections, Lotus Quickr, Microsoft SharePoint, Atlassian Confluence, Yammer, Central Desktop — as part of improving the way they work. There are many user adoption strategies that can be used to this end: over-the-shoulder watching, classroom training, real-to-life narrative scenarios, exemplar stories, and more.
So, I have a request to make. I’m looking for input from you about how you approach user adoption for collaboration tools at your place of work. I have created a survey on user adoption strategies—it will take you 10 minutes to complete. Would you be willing to share your experience with me please by taking the survey?
Thanks much … all my best for your work.
Simplifying IT Continues as Mantra
Reducing IT complexity has been a goal for many enterprises for the past few years. As is typical of a trend, many factors contribute to this desire to simplify today’s IT infrastructures, systems and applications that have created a complex mix of vendors addressing multiple issues.
As a result, simplicity as a key message in product positioning seems to be spreading. In the last few days alone a handful of announcements have prominently incorporated IT simplicity.
Yesterday HP and Microsoft Corp. announced a three-year agreement to “invest $250 million to significantly simplify technology environments for businesses of all sizes.”
According to a written statement, the companies expect to deliver new solutions that will:
- be built on a next-generation infrastructure-to-application model;
- advance cloud computing by speeding application implementation; and
- eliminate complexities of IT management and automate existing manual processes to lower overall costs.
The companies say the reason for the agreement is to improve the customer experience for developing, deploying and managing IT environments.
Tuesday’s announcement from VMware of its intent to purchase Zimbra from Yahoo! also pushed the theme of simplicity. Steve Herrod, chief technology officer for VMware, used a form of the term simple (simplify, simplicity, simpler) at least a dozen times in his blog talking about the acquisition.
Herrod writes: “VMware’s mission is to simplify IT, and every VMware product focuses on attacking the complexity and rigidity that has crept into this world. In many ways we see the excitement over cloud computing to be a longing for a simpler, more flexible way of doing computing. The VMware strategy is to help customers achieve cloud-like efficiency and operational improvements across the major IT infrastructure investment areas. To date this strategy has involved products and services targeting complexity in datacenter infrastructure (e.g. VMware vSphere and VMware vCenter Server), desktops (e.g. VMware View and VMware Fusion), and application development (e.g. SpringSource, VMware Lab Manager, and VMware Workstation). With this acquisition, we will extend our focus into email and collaboration, one of the core services (along with areas such as file and print services and identity management) that IT departments universally provide to their users.”
As IT infrastructures age while budgets constrict, the appeal for IT organizations to re-think and simplify in 2010 will only grow. It will be interesting to see if the vendor promises of simplification truly translate to increased productivity and better IT management.
Happy New Year to All
As 2009 draws to a close, my thoughts turn to the year in review. The messaging space has never been slow moving, and this year has proved no different.
I won’t offer a replay here, but suffice it to say the topics that I will most remember include social media growth; malware exploits, botnets and the take down of Mega-D; cloud computing with more email infrastructures making the move off premises than ever before; virtualization adoption and message archiving.
I suspect that we will see more of all in 2010, with a special emphasis on social media as Twitter and Facebook continue to mature and new ways to take advantage of those mediums (from legitimate businesses and malware makers alike) are created. Applications, designed for everything from Web sites to mobile devices, will continue to emerge making it the job of IT administrators to not only figure out how to best manage the applications, but also understand the security implications too.
Data will also continue to be a focus, as more regulations surround storing, accessing and securing data in motion and at rest. Archiving will continue to be more widely adopted, as fast access to electronic data becomes expected of all industries. Social media and unified communications archiving, along with its eDiscovery implications, will be an interesting topic to follow in 2010. Privacy too will be more and more of an issue to watch, what with all this data being maintained and accessible.
There is never a dull moment in this space, be it in security, social media, collaboration, virtualization, online marketing, compliance & privacy or any of the other topics we like to follow. The Messaging News team is very grateful to our readers, advertisers and industry experts that have offered support and good wishes for our continued success and for contributing to our unique offering. As we anticipate 2010, our goal is to continuously improve ourselves, so we can provide you with a trustworthy source of messaging news, trends and insights.
My Messaging News colleagues join me in sending our best wishes for 2010.
