Levy Rivers's List: tech-matters

• This blurring of business and consumer focused applications is called “consumerization” by technology research firms such as Gartner and executives at companies such as Microsoft. Consumerization posits that consumer technologies — including social networking tools, user generated content and wikis (web-based software that allows people to create content collaboratively) — are being increasingly adopted by corporate America
• Experts at Wharton agree that consumer technology has been going corporate in recent years. Underlying this emerging trend are young and tech-savvy workers — called “digital natives”
• conundrum to the traditional corporate technology department. Previously, companies dictated what software and hardware were used for work purposes. Today, choosing technology is becoming increasingly democratic as workers get more of a say
• “We have observed a convergence of technologies between these two segments [consumer and corporate] because the user needs have been converging,” says Christian Terwiesch, a professor of operations and information management at Wharton. For instance, workers are demanding that corporate technology — say a search tool within a company — be as user friendly as Google’s popular search site.
• Spurring this convergence of corporate and consumer technology is the fact that the line between personal lives and work has blurred.

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• And for more commercial sites and social networking platforms, delivery of professional content, editing of user generated content and responding to the needs of the users generally involves the employment of staff for those roles. Further, the ongoing bug fixing and continuing development of functional components that improve the accessibility and accuracy of information presented is an ongoing cost - and a large one.

• Technology vendors have begun selling tools that allow companies to build social networks internally for their employees. But recent research and interviews with analysts suggest that the adoption of these tools has been slow due to a lack of engagement by users and the stiff competition for their time posed by sites such as Facebook.
• In 2008, Forrester expects companies with 1,000 or more employees to spend approximately US$110 million for building externally facing social networks, while only $60 million for the internal variety. Over time, that gap will widen. By 2013, the consultancy predicts external spending to reach $1.7 billion, while internal spending will hold around $208 million.
• "They're competing with the public social network," Yarmis says. "The challenge they have is that the public ones can replace the private ones, but the private ones can't replace the public ones."
• Analysts say the social network offerings by Microsoft and IBM-the two vendors Forrester predicts will dominate the software market for collaboration technologies- have good basic functions but need to do a better job at feeding information into them automatically rather than relying on employees to do it themselves.
• But AMR's Yarmis notes that end-users will want something that looks pretty, and that blends enterprise and consumer content in one area. One vendor in particular, WorkLight, has worked at pushing corporate data as widgets to users' Facebook and iGoogle home pages while not exposing that information to those people's "friends" outside the corporate firewall.

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• Which just wouldn’t work for me. One of the first things I do to start my day is page back to the last Twitter I read the night before, catching myself up. If you following a 130 people, this easily accomplished. 13,000, not so much.

• Tim Bray, for example, clearly views Twitter as a volume tool, saying:
   

  There’s one thing that’s become terribly clear to me: Twitter is inherently a river-of-news; when I come back to my computer after a while offline, I have no urge to look back at the missed tweets. If it’s important, it’ll come back.
• Twitter is for me a personal tool first, business tool second. I’m not paging backwards through my Twitter history every morning to learn anything important; I’m paging backwards to learn the spectacularly unimportant. And that almost certainly won’t come around again.

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• Focus on what achieves results, not what some faux guru says you should do.
• Is there another strategy that could be completed in less time? Is there something else that your business depends on that you’re putting off because it’s not as fun as playing with your Facebook profile or posting on Twitter?
• Don’t get caught up in the flavor of the week. There are new social networking sites popping up all the time. Before setting up an account and investing your valuable time with one, see who’s using it and what kind of results they’re getting.

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• As you can see, engagement takes many forms. Some are likely to generate more discussions with the company while others might result better connections between customers. Some will fade away over the next 6-12 months while others will continue to grow and evolve.