Highlights from the Gartner PCC Conference--London

A very interesting two days at the Gartner Portal, Content, and Collaboration Conference in London this week. Below is a Twitter summaries of some of my 'take-aways'. Enjoy.

Baroness Susan Greenfield, Britain's foremost neuroscientist, gave an amazing keynote talk about the brain--here are a few nuggets:

• Words make up 10% of communication, body language 55%, and voice 35% - What does that say about online social networks?

• Obese people are more reckless than skinner people ... this has been proven scientifically.

• creativity will be the commodity of the 21st century

She plugged her new book, "ID: The Quest for Identity in the 21st Century" as well, which sounds very interesting.

From the analyst presentations, here are some of Gartner's observations/predictions. You can get the whole story by going to Twitter and searching on the hashtag #gartnerpcc.

• Between 50%-70% of inquiries to Gartner about collaboration are about SharePoint (depending on the analyst)

• Several ways to prevent collaboration project failure:

o Target specific behaviors

o Align the project with specific business goals

o Integrate into the existing infrastructure

o Remember culture change takes time

o Socially enable 'everything you do' where the culture allows it."

o Simplify; more is less, user experience matters

o Be inclusive, bring in legal, etc. early

o Focus on making the 'connectors'' lives better & engaging w/them.

• Thoughts on social software:

o Email is adopted by over 90% of the enterprise workforce. Social software is WAY down the adoption list - wikis at 20+% top the list. Social software is not being used pervasively in the enterprise.

o Social networking adoption in the enterprise is about 5% according to a Gartner survey. Blogs at 15% adoption.

o The social software market is segmented by Internal, Internal/External on your enterprise, Internal/External on someone else's infrastructure.

o Picking social networking tools -- you need to look at different types of collaboration as well (my suggestion -- for more information, look at things like - http://bit.ly/cYgCTP)

o There are too many choices for social software; there will be a vendor shakeout in the market.

o Questions to ask before buying social software--is it SaaS? What are the use cases? Working with an existing platform? Is it an off-the-shelf product? Can I or I need to write extensions? What is the payback window? What risks am I taking?

• On 4th generation collaboration

o How ready are orgs for 4th gen collaboration? cultural acceptance - about halfway, purpose, magnetism, and metrics are far lower

o 'Collaborative decision making' includes social networking, people, collaboration and decision tools

o 'Collaborative decision making' software is a best of breed story today; no single vendor solution

o The most popular form of app integration on Windows is the ALT-Tab key

o Collaboration and content are coming together via social network analysis and content recommendation engines

o What are the risks of 4th gen collaboration tools? security, legal, and privacy - know this; plan accordingly-start in the right places

o Collaboration plan for CIOs for 12 months - observe collaboration patterns, evaluate tools, create a sandbox, incent employees to cooperate

• On Google Wave

o Google Wave (R.I.P.) was what a 4th gen collaboration tool should look like.

o Why did Google Wave fail? It tells us something about people's ability to change

o Why did Google Wave fail - lack of Google commitment, focus on tech and not adoption, lack of integration and evolution

o Google's approach to Wave support indicates why enterprises are wary of Google's approach - lack of commitment and support

• On enterprise email:

o Is email going away? we see no signs of that; volumes are growing, and investments in email are growing

o Young people entering the workforce adapt to the tools of the workplace and they begin to email even if they didn't before