Blogger: Craig Roth
As we approach the start of the year, I would like to post up our view of the 2009 landscape for communication, collaboration,and content. This came out of discussions the Collaboration and Content Strategies team had when we met in October to discuss next year's research agenda.
It's worth noting that rather than showing a list of technologies on a maturity curve, they have been placed in context of the persistent issues they represent. For example, just as the e-mail field is starting to feel boringly stable after the rumble that open source started in this market, SaaS e-mail comes along and shakes everything up again. As shared drives ride off into the sunset (and good riddance!), wikis and blogs are entering the scene as new ways to post up and share information.
The point is that topics like e-mail and content management have been around a long time and will continue to evolve and even be exciting if you don't keep a narrow focus on just one form of it while missing newer developments.
It's also important to note the cyclical nature of organizational dynamics, which underlies everything we talk about related to communication, collaboration, and content. Rather than just disappearing, terms like "knowledge management" fade from view only to be rediscovered when their time is right. Governance has been on the tip of the tongue for at least five years now in our space, but it may fade only to be rediscovered under a new name ten years from now.
That is why it is so important to understand the basic concepts and dynamics behind communication, collaboration, and content before delving into the specifics of any specific technology. If you don't understand your history, for example, social networking can be felled by the same issues that caused collaborative workspaces to fail before them. I guess what I'm saying is that we expect many exciting developments in 2009, but when you step back "there is nothing new under the sun". Come to think of it, "sunsetting" is a good term for this chart - when the sun sets it disappears from view for a while, just to rise again on a new day.
It's correct what you say about wikis and blogs. Big companies are still not ready to 'let things go'...
Posted by: Erwin Sigterman | December 23, 2008 at 11:32 PM