Charlene Li has been doing interesting work at Forrester, writing about trends in social computing in consumer and (more recently) enterprise environments. Unlike many analysts at the conventional research firms, Charlene puts her money where her mouth is, and maintains an active blog that isn't simply a thumbnail of her firm's expensive industry pieces.
In keeping with her unique approach to her work, Charlene hosted many of the Irregulars for cocktails on Wednesday night while we were all in San Francisco for the Office 2.0 conference. Upon arriving, Charlene announced that Forrester is officially expanding its coverage of social software to include the enterprise. Charlene will focus on consumer trends, while G. Oliver Young will build out the enterprise coverage. Oliver was bright and eager, but isn't yet a blogger and must find out for himself whether he has a passion for social software before we know if he can carry Charlene's baton.
Charlene wanted to speak to the Irregulars to get our thoughts on the key talking points of Enterprise 2.0 trends and the emergence of social software. The conversation took many turns, but solidified around a series of Enterprise 2.0 Myths that we felt Forrester should address in their launch coverage, including:
- Myth: The incumbent enterprise technology behemoths aren't adopting Web 2.0 and social software technologies
- Myth: Business value is maximized by compartmentalized (departmental) silos of information
- Myth: Social software fails to address critical issues like security, versioning, provisioning and integration
- Myth: CIOs can stem the adoption of social software throughout their organization
One of the interesting things about the conversation (Charlene and Oliver joined us after the event for our Irregulars dinner, too) was that Forrester appears willing to build out a coverage today before many enterprise customers are inquiring, with the idea that they'll have a highly profitable practice in a few years with best-in-class domain expertise. A lot of Forrester's biggest customers (read: Global 2000 CIOs) aren't going to find a lot of our assertions popular ones, but that doesn't change their significance. Kudos to Charlene and Oliver (and Forrester for giving them the platform) to prepare CIOs for the changes ahead rather than collecting the easy $$$ by promising them that today's realities are the realities of tomorrow.
Related:
- Dennis Howlett posts his thoughts from the get together
- Dan Farber provides some photos of the chat
office2.0 charlene li enterprise irregulars social software forrester irregulars blogs wikis enterprise2.0 woodrow
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