You can access the full report from Cisco but here are a few of the statistics that caught my eye:

• Of the employees that admit breaking IT policies, about 41% say it’s because they need the restricted program and application to get the job done — they’re simply trying to be more productive and efficient.
• 20% of employees worldwide said they break IT policy because they believe their company or IT team will not enforce it.
• 41% said they are restricted from using Facebook at their job and 35 percent are restricted from using Twitter at work or with work devices.
• 66% of employees believe they should be able to connect freely with any device — personal or company-issued — and access the applications and information that they need around the clock. Policy or no policy, many employees will simply do it, raising the question about how effective a policy is and how IT can update, enforce and ensure better compliance.

In the world of regulated industries policy enforcement is critical. You can’t simply assume that employees will remember all the things they should and should not do. Automating that policy (for both access and data capture) are steps organizations can take to start opening up access to the social web.

Companies also need to start planning for multi-device use. While you can’t always enforce usage policy outside of work you can plan for ways to manage the data that is being created. This is especially true for regulated industries where data retention and supervision is required.

I won’t analyze every prediction but rather focus on the ones that really caught my eye and will probably surprise most of our readers.

Prediction #1
“By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.”

Today MySpace is the 4^th largest email provider beating out both Yahoo and Gmail. And Facebook recently announced a full-fledged email service, which will instantly make it the largest email provider in the world once launched.

“The rigid distinction between e-mail and social networks will erode. E-mail will take on many social attributes, such as contact brokering while social networks will develop richer e-mail capabilities,” said Matt Cain, research vice president at Gartner

My complaint with all the great social tools at my disposal is that they all live on different sites. Will there ever be one site to rule them all? I doubt it. But some are going to get very close. Facebook is going to have all of my friends, my live feeds, my photos, my chat client and soon email.

What will all this mean for your business? If you haven’t embraced social networking you need to start immediately. Otherwise you risk missing out on future sales, productivity improvements and valuable connections that can help drive your business forward.

Prediction #2
“By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.”

The growth of Twitter has caused many vendors and enterprises to take notice. As more and more people consume information in 140 character bytes there is a natural desire to bring this capability in house. However, the idea that “Twitter-like” functionality will see the same success is a little mis-guided. A key part of Twitter’s success is the size of their network. With a small, enterprise focused network and the fact that the service will be purely business focused it will be challenging to get employees to adopt the replica vs. just using what they know and love, Twitter.

Prediction #3
“Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.”

Just as social software is causing the enterprise to reinvent how they work it is also disrupting the way IT departments operate. Business users are testing, using and adopting solutions with or without the help of IT.  The most successful IT groups will be those that partner with the business to better understand their needs and find ways to deliver solutions on their timelines. With so much of today’s software just a few mouse clicks away, all hosted in the cloud and managed off site there is almost no barrier to the business making their own decisions on what is best for them and their business process.

What do you think? Are you surprised by these predictions?

Cisco

Here are a few of the study highlights.

The first set of findings point to the increased use and integration of consumer-based social networking tools in the enterprise.

“75 percent identified social networks as the consumer-based social media tools they primarily use, while roughly 50 percent of the group also identified extensive use of microblogging.”

This part is old news. Organizations are racing to adopt social networking and microblogging tools to help drive the business and it seems there is a new article about it every day.

“Social networking tools are spreading into core areas of the value chain, including the marketing and communications, human relations, and customer service departments.”

Organizations are now moving beyond social networking silos. They’ve already proven there is value in tapping these tools as stand alone solutions and now they are looking for ways to integrate social into their enterprise processes and systems.  This is the next big wave.

While usage and integration is skyrocketing, companies have been lax in regards to governance and involving IT in their decisions.  Ultimately, this creates a great deal of risk and exposure.

“Only 1 in 7 companies noted a formal process associated with adopting consumer-based social networking tools for business purposes, indicating that the potential risks associated with these tools in the enterprise are either overlooked or not well understood.”

This is likely a result of the unbridled growth of these tools and all the buzz associated with them.  But like any good business decision, companies need to step back, understand what they are trying to achieve, evaluate the risks and put the tools in place to manage the program. I will say that the companies we’ve been working with in regulated industries are taking a very programmatic approach to adopting social.  While other industries may not face the same challenges they can learn a lot from these institutions.

“Only 1 in 5 participants identified any policies in place concerning the use of consumer-based social networking technologies in the enterprise.”

This point has come up before.  If you fall in this camp be sure to check out this list of sample social media policies.  As of today there are over 115 examples.  In addition, here is a great list of government related social media policies.

Be careful in thinking that a policy alone is all you need.  Deloitte found in an Ethics & Workplace Survey that 49% of employees say a company policy won’t change how they behave online. As a result you should evaluate tools to help you monitor activity to protect your employees and your brand.

“Due to the unstructured nature of social networking, companies continue to struggle with policy creation and adoption, as copying an established governance process from other, more structured areas (for example, information technology) often doesn’t work for social networking.”

Until recently companies have had two choices when it comes to social networking sites. Open the floodgates or completely block access. Since these are consumers sites there are no built in management controls for the enterprise. This is one reason why social middleware has become such a hot topic.  With it companies can apply structure, define policies, control access and protect their brand on these open, consumer sites.

“Businesses also find difficulty in striking the right balance between the social and personal nature of these tools while maintaining some degree of corporate oversight.”

We hear this a lot from our clients as well.  On Twitter users can easily create multiple personas.  However, on Facebook and LinkedIn you are only allowed a single account under their terms of use.  As a result there is no way to separate your personal activity from the professional on these sites.

Again the need for social middleware becomes clear.  Adopting this middle layer creates the ability for employees to choose whether or not content is personal vs. professional.  As a result companies can implement policies that give employees the ability to choose what category the content falls under and as a result how that content will be monitored, retained and managed by the enterprise.

“Only 1 in 10 respondents noted direct IT involvement in externally facing social networking initiatives. Although the IT department is typically not involved as a primary decision maker, respondents did recognize the need for these tools to scale and properly integrate with existing business processes to reap maximum benefits.”

There are two items of note here. First for companies to realize the full benefits of these tools they will need direct integration to their people, processes and systems. Building loose connections in a one-off manner to each of these sites it not the answer.  IT will want a single point of integration to marry enterprise processes with the top sites of today and those that will be the next Facebook tomorrow.

The second reason it is critical to involve IT is that these sites have a very real impact on the infrastructure of the enterprise. A report from Blue Coat noted “a company based in the US was having problems connecting with its South Africa office” due to the fact that “the bandwidth on its WAN link was completely consumed and it found that 75% of that traffic was Facebook.”

Of course blocking access is not the answer. In that same report they highlighted a customer that “blocked Facebook and within 48 hours they had to unblock it.  Marketing and HR had complained that it was critical to them getting the job done.”

There has to be a happy medium.  Companies will be forced to open up access to these tools but at the same time they need to manage that access.  One solution to the bandwidth problem is to govern access to those parts of the site that consume the most, like videos and photos.  This way you meet the needs of the business by giving access while not crippling the rest of the network.

In addition to the analysis in the report there are some great perspectives by industry leaders on why adopting these social tools will ultimately be a driver of success and competitive advantage.

“Companies who will succeed in embracing the tremendous power of social networking will be those who design a collaborative IT architecture capable of supporting the use of these technologies and mitigating the risks they pose.”
Nick Earle, senior vice president, Cisco Services

“Businesses need to embrace social media not only to remain competitive, but also to continue to attract top talent. The next generation of leaders will be exceptionally savvy with these tools, so 3M is using social media externally to help us with recruiting. Several of the graduates we hired this year specifically told us that they hadn’t considered 3M before they saw our employer profile on social media.”
Hugh Murphy, e-Channels, 3M U.K. and Ireland

Thanks Cisco for a great report on a hot topic. I’m looking forward to part 2.

The up-right triangle was the hierarchy of life before the explosion of the Internet and social media. The hierarchy of today is an inverted triangle: the people control the business. They control the conversation.

I know that this is an obvious statement (unless you’ve been completely disconnected from the world to this point).  You, me, and everyone around us now live in a tangle of Twitterbookblogger-ness. Topics of conversation are thrown around through more channels then we can keep track of and it is happening every second of every day. It’s hard for you and me to not notice the conversation, but even more so, it’s the equivalent of sticking your head in the sand if you are a business and not engaging in the conversation.

Businesses are frequently the conversation topic and they are at the bottom of the triangle. The conversation affects businesses in two ways: Customers building conversation about their brand and the business’s employees having their own conversations at work.

Many companies have already started monitoring the conversations that their customers are having. It has helped them maintain a better relationship with each customer and it has also helped them with PR, Marketing, Sales and Customer Service. “Monitoring Twitter for PR problems in real time” is the most effective marketing tactic for both B2C and B2B companies according to a survey by eMarketer.com.

Unlike this open approach to their customers, companies have responded with a much more militaristic response when looking inward. Many of them refuse to let employees use social networking sites at work. Robert Half Technology found that 54% of CIOs said their firms do not allow employees to visit social networking sites for any reason while at work.

This not only creates employee satisfaction issues, but it cuts off the most important connection to your customers – your employees. Think back to the inverted triangle.  Is it enough to give the power to connect to a select few employees? Absolutely not. You want to enable the entire company.  Your employees are clamoring for this, customers demand it and businesses that get there first will reap the benefits.

Once again the people (your employees) are going to be in control.  But that doesn’t mean companies need to open the floodgates.  You can enable the enterprise based on your social media policies.  You can even help employees separate their personal life from their professional on sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Is 2010 going to be the year you enable social at your enterprise?

ReadWriteWeb

#5 “A new social network will rise to join the big ones. It may offer the privacy that Facebook is moving away from; it may be mobile and location-centric; it may focus on personal content recommendations.”

There is no doubt that Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter will continue to be successful. The question is who is next and how will it impact the enterprise? Today companies are struggling to define their social media strategy and policies.  By the time companies figure out the current landscape it will have shifted.  Keep a close eye, not just on the new social networks that take a leadership position, but on the ones that can measurably impact business processes (hint: follow the path your customers/prospects take, not just the industry buzz).

#4 “Facebook will become the Borg. Its number of users will continue to climb until the network is as ubiquitous as Google and lay people confuse Facebook with “the Internet.” They’ll make more money and control more data than ever before.”

Translation – Facebook is here to stay.  Remember back when Google wasn’t the #1 search engine? How much were you investing in Google SEO or paid search? Probably not much.  Well just as the industry shifted to optimize parts of their business around Google’s algorithms companies need to do the same for Facebook.  The companies that are already there have a head start.  The companies that are late to the game have an opportunity to be fast followers.

#3 “Software as service becomes ever more popular, as businesses and governments choose to focus on their core business and realize the benefits of lightweight technologies in the cloud – including rapid deployment and the low cost of switching.”

There are countless examples of successful cloud-based services.  Examples include Salesforce, Google Apps (did you know that more than 2 billion businesses run Google Apps?!), NetSuite and hundreds more coming on the scene every day.  One important aspect of this prediction is that companies will start finding ways to adopt traditional consumer cloud apps for the enterprise.  Employees will demand it.  They are already using these tools in their personal lives and now they want to bring those great experiences into the workplace to help make them more productive at their job.

#2 “Social analytics features explode onto the scene in 2010. Twitter opens Pro accounts, including analytics and an API to access them. Google strikes a deal to integrate Twitter analytics with its Google Analytics product.”

There has been a lot of buzz around social media monitoring in 2009 and this trend will continue.  Enterprises need to be paying attention to what’s being said about them. More importantly they need to get involved in the conversation.  The other side of the coin that most have ignored is the concept of social analytics inside the enterprise.  What are your employees saying? What are the hotspots inside your four walls? Look for more in 2010 from Socialware on this topic.

#1 “Consumer-based social networks will make big efforts to gain wider access to the enterprise, as more companies seek to open up to the social Web. The information architecture of social networks will change to accommodate the greater degrees of control that the enterprise requires. This will bring on the rise of “social middleware” – services that act as a layer between social networks and the enterprise.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.  What’s interesting is that each of the other 4 predictions supports the need for social middleware.  Regardless of which social network comes on the scene next, social middleware will help enterprises abstract out this complexity.  For companies that haven’t integrated Facebook into their business processes they will need social middleware to help make that a reality.  And on the broader topic of embracing cloud services, specifically these open social networks, social middleware will accelerate the adoption for enterprises across all verticals.  Finally, social analytics focused on activity within the four walls of an enterprise will be enabled thanks to social middleware.

2010 will be exciting.  Here’s to helping make these predictions a reality.

The long and winding road to arriving at what we consider to be the perfect description of the void in the technology and market landscape that we fill with our technology is an interesting one and it is worth sharing details of why we chose this label and why it is so important.  Category naming and claiming is a big deal…we don’t take it lightly. Hopefully the following will share some insight into why we thought that it was so important for Socialware.

As a recent ReadWriteWeb article so eloquently put it, “Socialware talks in a language that IT can understand”.  Thank you for that great line Alex.  In a week full of Socialware visibility, this was one of, if not, our very favorite line because it so neatly represents the genesis of Socialware.

We are asked a lot about why Cameron and I were inspired to create the company in May of 2008 and why we were able to come up with this novel, albeit logical approach to filling such an important gap in the market.  The response is always that it was a direct result of the unique background and experience that we had had in two worlds, the world of enterprise software which we spent the better part of 10 years in, and the world of web 2.0 which Cameron and I had both been fully immersed in for the past 4 years.

For us the idea that enterprises would want to embrace the public infrastructure of social technologies, which are free to use, innovate faster than enterprise software, and that employees are clamoring to use, was the obvious next step towards the consumerization of IT.

But based on our experience we were also keenly aware of the challenges of identity management, policy management, business process management, legacy integration and more.  How would we go about “enterprise enabling” the consumer social web?  The answer was of course to extend the old familiar notion of the glue layer, the traditional middleware that is used intra-enterprise to tie together legacy systems.  So in Alex’s words, the repurposing of the term middleware and applying it to social provides comfort to IT teams in a world where they are confronting a whole new array of technologies with a unique and daunting set of challenges.

Conveniently enough the use of the term middleware in general has fallen out of popularity since the consolidation of that market occurred.  There was no one actively staking claim to that term and in the new world of the “Hyperextended” enterprise, it was clear that middleware had to take on a new dimension. It had to reach beyond the four walls of the enterprise and encompass the open social web.

Another great part of the Social Middleware convention is that is says – security, control and enablement – all at once.  Early on in Socialware’s life we really struggled with the question of: are we about control or are we about enablement? We knew the answer was both but that was always hard to get across to the market.  We have always known that while the present environment is about control, i.e. access control, governance, compliance and more, the future is really to achieve true collaboration across consumer social networks.  Nothing encapsulates this better than the term Social Middleware.

Finally, Social Middleware is a bit of a shout out to the legacy of our hometown, Austin, TX.  In the technology world, Austin has been perceived traditionally as an enterprise software town having been the home of enterprise software juggernauts like Vignette, Tivoli, a large IBM office and more recently companies such as Webify Solutions and Solarwinds.  Austin is making a concerted effort as a tech community to form a new identity in the web 2.0 world.

Local high profile startups such as Bazaarvoice have helped to further that cause.  Given this history and the knowledge base of both experiences, enterprise software minds combined with fresh blood and thinking on the web 2.0 front, I can’t think of a better location to build a Social Middleware company. We are all excited when we think about the impact that Socialware as a company might have on the local Austin technology scene which we have all been a part of for many years.

So how has the term been accepted so far?  Use of the term web wide within 24 hours of our launch date (Dec. 9^th) went from next to nothing to over 19,000 references.  To me that sounds like acceptance of a new category in a day.

We look forward to connecting with you and sharing more details about Social Middleware and what it means for your business.

Essentially, this can be applied to many facets of life. People cling on to what’s familiar and are generally unwilling to change their routine. In the world of social media, our favorite meals consist of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. The unfamiliar sushi is all the other companies that muddle in replicating what’s already in our core diet.

Observing the fairy-tale success stories of Facebook and Twitter, many companies have tried capturing the value of these brands and applying them to their markets. For example: the professional workplace.

The growing popularity and necessity of social media in the personal life and in the workplace is inevitable, but how can companies make or find a social media service that fits their workplace environment? The best scenario is a product that can act as the middleman. It combines the best aspects of familiar social media tools with the aspects that the professional workplace requires.

These companies have to remember that people still want to stick to their usual comfort foods. Throwing a big cut of raw fish onto their plate might be too shocking, if not upsetting! As revolutionary as something may be in the eyes of the company, it’s best to blend the best of both worlds so consumers can slowly ease out of their comfort zone. They need to make a connection between what’s new and old: a middleman.

Think of it as the cream cheese in a sushi roll. People love cream cheese with smoked salmon on a bagel. Why not cream cheese with salmon wrapped in rice? The cream cheese is the middleman. Long-term success in bringing social media into the enterprise will come as a result of combing the best of the enterprise with the best of the existing social infrastructure.  To do it though you need a middleman to help bridge the gap, or essentially, cream cheese.

Is anyone else feeling hungry?