Beyond Productivity

I listened yesterday to Gartners predictions about IT investment the next 5 years at their Portal, Content & Collaboration Summit in London. All the investments in ERM, AP, etc. do not help your competitiveness, it just the cost of being able to do business (the baseline). Our focus will now be the information worker (therefore the conference theme “Beyond Productivity), and the investments will be in Portals, Content and Collaboration in addition to Information Access technologies (PCC&IA).

They were using the following numbers to document this interest in Europe amongst decision makers (without any more demographics);

• Portals                           82%
• Content Management      87%
• Search                           65%
• Team ware / team share 57%
• E-Learning                     59%
• Web conferencing          49%
• Instant Messaging          37%

Collaboration for Gartner means Team sharing / Teamware, Web Conferencing and Instant Messaging, and Debra Logan’s top 3 critical success factors for PCC & IA are:

• Access and work within existing culture and engagement
• Look for return beyond ROI
• Understand that there will always be tension between control and collaboration, governance and freedom (your new employees live in Facebook, MySpace, etc, and you will not be able to hire them if you hinder them from using these communities…)

By Atle Skjekkeland.