So what other collaboration trends does the study confirm? Remote work, it turns out, is largely a privilege of those higher up in the office food chain. Previous demographic studies on telecommuters and remote workers have revealed that they’re a highly educated, highly paid lot, who are generally higher up in their organizations. Forrester concurs, saying:

The report also reveals that workers are untethered from the office as they rise in rank. 53 percent of individual workers are office-bound, but that number drops to 35 percent among managers and supervisors, and plummets to just 10 percent among directors and executives.

No surprises there, then, but another finding is eye-opening. Here at WebWorkerDaily, social technology at work is a big topic, and we cover a variety of social tools for enterprise, from Jive and Chatter to Yammer. But despite its being a fast-growing market segment with huge media buzz, Forrester reveals exactly how far these technologies are from going mainstream. The research concludes (italics are mine):

Adoption of enterprise 2.0 technologies is still nascent. Only one in six Gen Y professionals uses social tools. Despite significant and ongoing investment in enterprise social technologies, their roughly seven-year lifespan within enterprises has yielded a maximum of 12 percent adoption within the overall workforce. This market has failed to displace traditional collaboration technologies like email as a preferred way to communicate at work.

Of course, this finding doesn’t mean that 12 percent isn’t the thin edge of a very big knife. We may yet see social for the enterprise slice into the mainstream market, but the Forrester research is a nice reminder of the gap between what’s commonplace among media types and geeks and what’s still alien to “regular people.” Several articles have made this point lately about consumer social media and Twitter. Perhaps it’s worth making about enterprise social as well.

For the time being, is enterprise social overblown?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Iain Farrell

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Proximal’s team will join Jive’s engineering group. Jive says Proximal’s technology should bolster its current analytics capabilities, making its software more intelligent and enabling it to offer the following features:

• Provide insight into relationships between employees, customers and partners
• Bolster the existing intelligence engine, which delivers content and expertise recommendations
• Enhance its search capabilities to cover large-scale external and internal data to deliver personalized results
• Provide data on the expertise and work of individuals and teams, as well as customers and partners
• Improve Jive’s current social media monitoring features

Financial details of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

With so much potentially valuable insight to gather from the vast amounts of data generated by the users of enterprise social networking tools, Jive isn’t the only social business vendor looking to further its big data efforts, of course. IBM also been making strides in this arena with the Social Analytics features in its Lotus Connections product, while other vendors, such as Yammer and Salesforce Chatter, also now offer analytics features. As the various enterprise social networking apps have matured, their feature sets have converged; the ability to offer companies intelligent tools to mine the data generated by their employees could prove to be a key differentiator in this highly competitive market. With this deal, Jive is keeping up with the Joneses.

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A new report at GigaOM Pro (subscription required) covers this landscape of new tools, looking at a selection of the leading companies in various sectors, examining each offering’s strength and weaknesses. However, I was particularly interested to read what author Haydn Shaughnessy thought made for sustainable (as opposed to functional) differentiators in the various providers of collaborative tools; looking more deeply at the value each vendor brings, rather than just the number of features its tools now provide. As you can see in the table below, many of the tools have very similar feature sets.

There are several potential sustainable differentiators that could each make for a strong product, including:

• Experience: Companies with more experience of the way tools are used in the workplace should have an edge over those that don’t. For example, companies with histories of working with user-driven communities, like Jive, will likely have an edge when implementing community features in its more recent apps. Of course, newer, inexperienced vendors could always acquire talent with the required experience, but in general, companies with long track records in a particular field will have more combined experience than those that don’t.
• Driving new concepts in collaborative work: Certain vendors, like Socialtext, are known to drive innovative thinking around new work practices, such as the use of “streams” to provide visibility in knowledge work. Companies at the forefront of those kind of innovations are likely to add ore value to their products.
• Ease of implementation: Some vendors offer tools, such as the “enterprise-lite,” consumer-like offerings from the likes of box.net and Yammer, that are easy to deploy and implement. They don’t require potential clients to go through a protracted enterprise decision-making process, and so are much less risky than complex, more expensive alternatives.
• Deep system integration: Some vendors have made integration with existing enterprise tools, like SharePoint a specialty. Certainly, if your business already has established enterprise tools in place, one of your priorities should be to look to vendors whose tools are designed to deeply mesh with those tools and improve upon them — not just superficially interface with them.
• Work process innovation: If discovering better work process is a priority, then Shaughnessy argues that businesses should choose a tool that’s already used by employees (presumably as this means that the concentrating on how the tool woks will be less of a priority for users), or one with strong ideation features, like brainstorming and discussion tools. I agree with this to an extent: Complex tools that force users into certain ways of working are much less likely to be used to discover new work processes; if you allow users to pick their own tools, they’ll implement their own ways of getting things done. The flipside, of course, is losing some control and oversight of employees.
• Stronger management oversight: While collaboration tools have the potential to make organizations flatter, we’ll still need some management oversight, and those managers will  need additional support if they’re working with remote teams. Certain vendors provide platforms with more advanced management tools that go beyond milestone setting or status updates.

Of course, certain companies would likely prioritize one or more of these differentiators depending on their needs, and when choosing software, there are many other factors to consider in addition to those listed above. But by looking deeper than the list of a product’s features, it’s possible to assess whether a company really brings an understanding of how its products could benefit the workplace and improve work processes,  and, ultimately, whether they will be successful.

Read a more in-depth analysis of these new work tools in the full report at GigaOM Pro (subscription required).

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This is why Google launched Google Apps Team Edition. Google Apps for Your Domain has been around for quite some time, but this set of tools requires someone from your IS department to administer it. Groups inside companies can easily subvert IS involvement by just entering your corporate email address and clicking on a link inside the resulting sign-up email.

That’s right, with no permission or approval forms*, you can do the following with your co-workers:

• generate and share documents, presentations, and spreadsheets with Google Docs
• easily schedule appointments with Google Calendar
• IM and conduct VoIP calls with Google Talk
• share a combined start page with a common iGoogle start page

Additionally, Google Apps Team Edition shows you others in your organization who have also signed up for Google Apps, enabling you to conduct the above mentioned activities with ease.

This is indeed an underhanded way to get Google Apps inside the enterprise. We at Web Worker Daily think Google Apps is a great way to collaboration on documents. The old school way of interfacing on documents centered around sending documents, spreadsheets, and presentations through email. The enterprise standard Microsoft Office Word has a “Track Changes” option which generally works well. However, what happens if not everyone on your team has Microsoft Office or worse yet: different versions of Microsoft Office? Being able to use Google Docs to generate the document and “Share” it with your colleagues is an attractive option.

On the other hand, having documents behind the firewall on centralized file servers has its advantages as well. Enterprises expend resources to ensure sensitive information stays in front of the proper audience. Having documents that may contain intellectual property is not a welcome thought to many companies. Additionally, having IM conversations that are unencrypted or archived may present legal, intellectual property, and human resource issues.

Google Apps Team Edition presents a fantastic option for lightweight collaboration among those who share documents. Also, being able to chat instantly and share calendars can present an attractive option for teammates. However, if intellectual property is a concern in any way, your organization should look at SharePoint, Jive’s ClearSpace or other offerings they have access to.

Which collaboration tools are your team working with? What tips would you have with working with the IS department?

* Disclaimer:  This article is not meant to encourage you to go around any policies or guidelines your company has on electronic communication and collaboration.  Before using Google Apps (or any other hosted collaboration tool), I suggest you consult your organization’s policies on such sites and services.

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