Forrester Reports that Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies

Zach Thomas of Forrester recently came out with a report, Corporate Social Networks will Augment Strategic HR Strategies, which stated that enterprise social networking applications are an emerging trend. Assisting on the report were Paul Hamerman, Claire Schooley, Charlene Li, and Meghan Donnelly. Zach added that many business processes could benefit from these applications. He wrote in the summary, “savvy human resources (HR) professionals are taking the lead and using them for recruiting, alumni programs, mentoring, learning, collaboration, and connecting people across the entire organization. They understand that corporate social networks are not a replacement for human interactions; this technology should augment — not replace — existing process automation apps, and they will need broad internal support for their initiatives to succeed.”

This has been a theme at Connectbeam and we are pleased to see these conclusions from Forrester. The report begins with a section titled, “professional networks are the backbone of business.” I could not agree more. He points out that collaboration translates into innovation, strong personal ties increase employee retention and they help with sales. He added that failure to establish a means to support this networking can result in lost knowledge when someone leaves, difficulties in finding the right people to help with pressing business challenges, failure to optimize relationships across geographies, and disappointment in younger workers who experience these networks outside work and expect them to be provided on the job. These younger employees may then turn to consumer web tools that are not designed to support business functions (see The Role of Facebook in the Enterprise) and will only operate in silos of the subset who might engage with them.

Zach offers a number of useful HR related applications for social networking applications in the report. It is nice to see Forrester continue to cover enterprise 2.0 and social networking. They predicted in an earlier report on the enterprise web 2.0 market that social networking applications will make up the largest share of the $4.6 billion that enterprises will be spending on enterprise web 2.0 applications by 2013 (see Forrester Predicts a Large Growth in Social Networking Market but How Will Its Integration Occur with the Enterprise?).

Zach divides the corporate social networking software market providers into three groups: targeted solution providers, adjacent solution providers, and platform players such as Facebook and LinkedIn. Connectbeam is included in his list of targeted solution providers and points out that we operate behind the firewall. We feel this offers greater security, control, and integration into company IT infrastructure than operating out in the cloud. Zach predicts that larger established application vendors will lag behind innovators in this space. At the same time, he predicts that many firms will stay with established tools such as Sharepoint as the market matures. This is one reason we recently announced our Sharepoint integration. He concludes with the good advice to align social networking tools with pressing business problems.

Comments

[Social Networking Software]

Hi,

I could not agree more that social networking software will be the backbone of corporations in the near future. Do you really think Facebook.com, Linkedin.com, ShareThis.com, and other Web 2.0 applications that are to market now are the right social media platforms for a corporation?

I find these platforms work for small businesses but besides the fact that the corporate world is years behind even knowing about social media I feel they need their own bread of social networking software & platforms.

When our company develops social networks for Small Businesses & Internet Entrepreneurs users understand the software because they are used to it. When we work with a corporation not only do they not familiar with the software but they do not even know what their company needs.

I feel corporate social networking software almost needs to be "dumbed down" for corporations.

Jeff

[Renjith]

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