Communications Day - the weblog

By Geoff Long (this appeared in CommsDay on 8 December)

It seems the annual analyst prediction season is getting earlier and earlier: there was a time when they’d all leave it until the New Year, but Gartner’s predictions already appeared in late November, while IDC just pulled its out of the oven with the first batch of fruit mince pies last week.
And like all good predictions, they contain few surprises – growth in traditional wired voice connections will slow in North America, says Gartner. Really. As Ad Nederlof, the former CEO of call centre specialist Genesys, once told me, analysts are very good at predicting what has happened, and if they really did know the future they wouldn’t be working as analysts.
IDC contains more of the same, predicting that the “Google effect” will encourage more companies to adopt disruptive business models faster. These disruptive business models, it says, are IT services and applications delivered online – things like Google, naturally, and the other poster child, Salesforce.com. It’s funny, but I thought we were smack bang in the middle of the web services revolution? Meanwhile, hosted applications was a prediction popular about five years ago but didn’t come, and now it looks like it possibly, maybe will come next year. Or the year after.
To be fair to the analysts (it’s the season of goodwill, after all), they do flesh their predictions out a bit further than the simplified examples I’ve given. That said, those in the industry will be familiar with most of the trends simply because they’re dealing with them daily.
NEW WORDS IN LEXICON: The fact that these things are happening can be evidenced by the new words and brands that have entered the lexicon in the last couple of years – you might want to look some of them up in the wikipedia, the ultimate in “wikis”, if you’re not up-to-date. Of course you know that a wiki is a type of web site that allows any user to add or edit content collaboratively.
Even the word blog just a couple of years ago would have had some people scratching their heads. Or what about Flickr, the web site for sharing digital photos, which incidentally started out as a tool that was created for a massively multiplayer online game – that’s another term that might have been relatively unknown outside of South Korea just a few short years ago.
And chances are you’re one of the 205,618,231 people that had downloaded Skype last time I looked, and you probably get news through an RSS feed or podcast.
The really interesting trend, one which both IDC and Gartner have spoken about in the last couple of months, is the way these consumer technologies are making their way into the corporate network. One example I like is that of Bob Lutz, the septuagenarian vice chairman of General Motors, who was one of the early corporate bloggers. GM is a big fan of blogs and uses this medium to enhance its public relations. It’s since been joined by a long line of “CEO bloggers” and there’s even a blog to keep track of all of the high-profile corporate bloggers (the “BlogWrite for CEOs”).
Another technology making its way into the corporate network is the peer-to-peer (P2P) technology normally associated with illegal music sharing. One of the most popular of the P2P platforms, BitTorrent, is already in use for distributing Linux software and in Groove Networks’ Virtual Office application. Groove has since been acquired by Microsoft and there’s word that its P2P technology will make it into future versions of Windows.
Meanwhile Gartner used its recent annual Symposium/ITxpo to warn businesses that these sorts of technologies will enter the business world whether the IT department likes it or not. Steve Prentice, vice president and chief of research at Gartner, said that the dynamics have changed and enterprises will struggle to dictate how employees and customer use technology.
“As home and office environments continue to merge, the knowledge worker of the future will demand the same level of functionality and flexibility in the workplace that they have got used to at home,” said Prentice. “When those demands are not met by the enterprise, history shows us that they will find the technologies and tools needed themselves in the consumer market.”
Which is as good a reason as any for checking out some of these new technologies now that the year-end slowdown is almost upon us. Stay tuned next week.