Barb Mosher posted an article on CMSWire about a new report on The State of Software Collaboration Implementations in 2011 from Forrester’s analyst T.J. Keitt.
Collaboration Implementations 2011
In the CMSWire article, Mosher cites the Forrester report’s statistic of “42% of workers work outside the corporate firewall”, which is driving the need for collaboration software.
Forrester’s research shows that companies are focusing on implementing Team Workspaces and Web 2.0 Toolsets. The chart to the right shows that 46% of the surveyed companies will invest in Team Workspaces and 42% will invest in Web 2.0 tools.
What is equally important to note is the relatively small number of companies that have already implemented collaboration software. Traditional collaboration tools like web conferencing, instant messaging, and video conferencing have been implemented in less than half the companies surveyed. Only email has penetrated over 50%. Newer collaboration tools, like Web 2.0 tools, have been implemented in less than 25% of companies.
Why so few implementations? I thought at least email would be ubiquitous, but on-premise plus hosted email adds up to only 77%. We’ve been discussing collaboration tools like team workspaces for at least a decade.
The Forrester report may contain the answer to why it is taking so long to see companies making these investments. When asked how these tools have improved the businesses implementing them, the top answers included reduced travel costs(62%), improved corporate communications (58%), and improved project management (44%). Forrester claims that most of the business surveyed (64%) realize between zero and four benefits.
Is that really the case that business are not seeing real business value in their collaboration implementations? Probably not. My own analysis is that many companies are very early into their implementations so measuring real value is very difficult. Some or many of the ‘already implemented’ companies may be in a pilot stage or in a limited roll-out phase. In those stages we usually see quick, easy benefits like reduced travel costs. Its not until the collaboration software is more widely used that we begin to see real business value generated.
