Gartner Predicts Enterprise Collaborative IT Projects to Grow 500% by 2009

June 21, 2005
By Kevin Rudden
Director of Communications, Interwise

Lou Latham, a principal analyst with research firm Gartner, predicted at this week's Collaborative Technologies Conference in New York City that, by 2009, 60% of all collaborative projects involving IT departments will be enterprise applications that involve projects such as ERP and supply chain automation.

That number is a 500% increase from the current 10%.

Latham's predictions came during his presentation on "Business Processes: Time for a Change," in which he outlined the "anxiety" that collaborative technologies are causing by being "socially disruptive" for established management hierarchies.

Current use of collaborative technologies in large companies ranges from "chaos" - described by Latham as ad-hoc purchases of point products by departments - to "managed chaos" - in which multiple tools co-exist - to "IT controlled" - in which companies select a collaborative suite for employees to use. Most people currently are in the "chaos" mode.

Likening the use of ad-hoc point collaborative products to the way personal computers originally empowered employees by granting them access to information, Latham noted that "this stuff is subversive" by uniting people within and without organizations in "adhocracies" that "grant them access to each other."

Collaborative technologies are changing the way people interact, and key elements of successful implementations will have both presence - to allow communities of people to interact with "one click"- and persistence - which will enable a memory or continuity of that interaction, Latham noted.

Already, collaborative technology has enabled productivity increases, but the true transformational changes will be evolutionary from today's contextual collaborative through the year 2020, when a variety of social factors combine with technology. Among these social factors are today's youth - raised on SMS, text messaging, IM and chat - joining the workforce, said Latham.

For businesses to make sense of this progression, they need to think in three- to five-year cycles of advancing technologies and develop collaborative as "a continuous, purposeful series of tasks tied to a process."

Despite today's chaotic implementation of collaborative technology, installations are growing rapidly within the enterprise and companies will develop processes to monitor it, manage it and measure it, Latham predicted.

Reported from the Collaborative Technologies Conference
taking place now in New York City

Kevin Rudden
Director of Public Relations
krudden[at]interwise.com | 617.475.2251
Interwise
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