Corporate Know-how and the Consumerization of IT

| August 23, 2010 | Collaboration Platforms
| Analyst: Brad Shimmin, Principal Analyst, Collaboration and Conferencing

Just as with the introduction of the World Wide Web in the early ‘90s, the consumerization of IT holds the potential of becoming this decade's most disruptive industry trend. The introduction of technologies and practices normally found within the consumer market into the enterprise has already substantially changed corporate IT departments. Corporate firewalls are much more porous; information governance and security practices are becoming a priority, even within smaller organizations; equipment ownership and support responsibility is shifting toward the user; and collaboration software itself is changing, thanks to the injection of consumer-oriented collaboration ideals such as tagging, microblogging, chat, and even video communications.

Collaboration platforms are evolving away from asynchronous, centralized content-centric solutions toward a real-time, decentralized, mobilized, and eclectic patchwork of Web- and premises-based collaboration services. Such collaboration platforms are less concerned with how knowledge is managed or stored and more concerned with how it is shared. Moreover, they are more interested in the relationship between knowledge and people than they are in where knowledge lives. In short, collaboration platforms are becoming real-time enterprise knowledge management engines.

This advisory will explore this consumer-driven trend, highlighting the market drivers behind the rise of knowledge management within the collaboration platform space. Furthermore, it will cover a number of technological advancements made by collaboration platform vendors as they respond to these drivers. In most cases, these innovations draw upon well-understood practices from disparate market segments such as knowledge management, search, and business intelligence.

Please fill out the following form to set up a conversation with a Current Analysis account
manager who can demonstrate our Collaboration Platform coverage.

Top