At the end of last year we were asked to make our predictions for this Blog. The problem with making predictions is that you tend to focus on what is newsworthy at the time & then predict the outcome; I’m guilty as charged (my predictions are here if you are interested). Having confidently predicted what will happen in 2009, the news then turned very negative and for the past three months the industry has been pretty inward looking as we reported in mid-January with nothing being hyped. Well yesterday changed all of that with Jive Software announcing Social Business Software (‘SBS’).

To be fair, Jive Software have been around for a while delivering collaboration products: instant messaging; wikis etc This announcement is for a suite of products that, Jive say, will enable large enterprises to use community type software (a la Facebook, Linked In and the like) to promote collaboration & innovation, as well as encouraging new ways of interacting with customers. I’ll let you read the press releases for more detail but where this looks interesting is that there is an analytics package that allows companies who deploy SBS to get a measure of how well the company is collaborating & innovating.

There is a sea change going on in large enterprises who initially saw social networking sites initially as a time waster and yet we’re starting to see their value. How many companies have an ad-hoc LinkedIn or Facebook group set up? These same large companies are now accepting social networking, and driving the first steps towards collaboration through use of wikis and knowledge management systems. It’s an interesting space to watch because the factors driving effective & productive adoption are the combination of technology and social elements. Whilst you can control the technology pretty easily, the cultural elements make a big difference to how an enterprise gets the ultimate value of investment in this type of solution.

The announcement by Jive Software yesterday will help to validate the use of software solutions like this but this is a new marketing proposition and the industry watchers aren’t fully clear where SBS plays against the competition. I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some hyperbole around what this product launch means, especially in the area of sales & marketing collaboration.

Another thought about this brave new world: last week came news about Tom-Tom in the Netherlands in a potential patent lawsuit with Microsoft to try and protect open source licences. That’s just between manufacturers. What would happen if collaboration between customers & suppliers, as promoted by SBS, lead to a customer offering a fantastic idea for a product enhancement which was used to make a lot of money by the recipient, that could be an interesting legal conundrum.

So, I’m going to add another prediction (there’s no rule that says I can’t!). I expect we’re going to see quite a lot of noise now about social computing driving innovation & productivity in the enterprise, and about how it enables customers & suppliers to work much more closely. Then we’re going to see the major software manufacturers positioning their products into this space. The positive benefit is that it will prompt more companies to look seriously at how collaboration tools, not just SBS, can help them.

Hopefully, this is going to be a fun ride.

I thought that company directors spent some of their time playing golf with their peers as part of “networking”. However it turns out that the modern IT director, such as ours, seems to think that a good time spent networking with his peers involves discussions around relevant topics like “Strategic Resourcing”. It was no surprise when he returned from a recent event and started asking me about using free open source software.

They had been discussing the effect of collaboration tools, especially instant messaging, on company culture. The CIO of a local utility company had mentioned that they were rolling out messaging using open source products which had saved capital expenditure compared to the commercial offerings. Without morning coffee I couldn’t really think of any cogent arguments either way and by the time I had he was away discussing something else of importance like the role of IT in business transformation.

The question of whether to use Open Source software or pay for commercial products keeps coming up and my answer is still the same as it has always been: It depends!

I’m not an automotive engineer, and when I sit in my car I’m not overly concerned about how it does what it does. I just want it to work. Frankly for most businesses I expect IT to be treated in the same way; concentrate on the business itself and how IT helps to make it work, not on how IT works. If that fits with how you want to do business, then you’ll want IT products to work without deviating your time away from the core activities.  Despite the occasional report to the contrary, software businesses put a lot of effort into testing their products to work well.

Larger companies like Microsoft or Symantec develop & test the processes around installation as well as ongoing use. They also publish specifications for how their software looks when you use it so that if you are familiar with one product, then another should be easier to find your way around as well. Of course this costs money & you pay for that.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some really good software packages in the open source world. OpenOffice comes to mind as a good alternative to Microsoft Office and it is free to use. It looks different to Microsoft Office and some of the features work in a different way. My family experiences with OpenOffice are probably typical of using open source & other free software:
My eldest son got to grips with OpenOffice almost immediately. He found his way around it quickly and used it to produce a lot of documents including some high quality camera-ready brochures ready for professional printing. But then he did study Computer Science for a year at university as part of his course so I’d expect him to be pretty savvy at this stuff.
His younger brother could use OpenOffice but found that the differences to Microsoft office were enough to put him off. He just wanted to get on with working, not with trying to find out how to do something when he’d already learnt once elsewhere. He gave up and bought Microsoft Office as he felt he was faster working with it.
My father-in-law took one look at OpenOffice and declared it so different to Microsoft Office that he gave up in confusion.

I try to think of who is using the software and what they want to spend their time doing. Microsoft Office skills are widely taught now so getting staff going with them is easy. A major organisation, like the one that the CIO above represents, may well have in-house training and support teams that are able to get staff up to speed with other products cost-effectively. For them open source software could offer significant savings, that’s why we see some local authorities taking this route. However for a smaller business without access to that sort of infrastructure then the cost of mainstream products may well be balanced against the ease of using them.

That for me sums up the whole open software product portfolio. If you are prepared to spend the time (and indirectly your money) then you can get some very good products cost-effectively. Most come with no guarantee, and you don’t get a telephone number to call if you have a problem. If that is for you then go for it, just be prepared and recognise that the up-front saving may be eroded by the in-life costs.

As I said, “It depends”

PS. I use open source software at home

Like virtually every organisation, we struggle with the volume of e-mails flowing around the business on a daily basis. Its that ‘first thing in the morning’ feeling when the inbox pops open, and there are 40 ‘short’ notes to be digested.

So we continue to explore the subject of Knowledge Management…. How do we reduce this avalanche of ‘information’, and at the same time, look to making much better use of it all and also still balance this against the need to be good at communicating and maintaining an open culture where employees want to share.

Its an area that most of the major software vendors have a story on, and we’ve talked to most of them, eventually settling on Microsoft’s Sharepoint as a key component in our plans.

This isn’t the end of the story by any means.  The next challenge is balancing the natural tendency and demand of the business for more storage, more collaboration and even more ‘exciting features’ against the sometimes opposing position of the IT teams to ensure that we can back up properly, recover deleted files quickly, keep costs under control and maintain an appropriate level of performance. It’s the never changing dilemma of the IT teams, and one that isn’t going to be solved anytime in the near future!

Things you might be interested in: Sharepoint