Carol Rozwell

The past two weeks have been interesting, as it typically is when I participate in a Gartner Summit event. I enjoyed the time talking with clients about their collaboration and social media initiatives. We discussed how to develop a social media strategy in the workshop and kibitzed about whether collaborative decision making can become a reality in command and control organizations.

At each event I attend, I am energized by the cool things people are doing with social software to make their teams more productive. It is fascinating to see how many ways the technology can be used to to spark innovation and creativity.

Here are some of the items that stood out for me as I talked with the delegates:

• Buyers are getting smarter about they way they procure social software. Less often it is purchased “on spec” with some nebulous rationale about making people more productive. More frequently there is a smaller implementation scope and a clearer ROI defined up front.
• Motivating employees to collaborate still remains a major stumbling block this stops organizations from getting all the value they wanted from their implementations. However, none of the clients I spoke with had changed their metrics to encourage collaboration.
• Social media still scares. As with other events, I talked to some people who fear social media, some who are dabbling with it and others who are enthusiastic. In our workshop, we gave attendees a taste of Gartner’s process for developing a social media strategy.
• KM is still lurking out there. Many clients are still trying to wrestle this beast to the ground, though they have changed their approach from aggregating stuff in repositories to creating connections among people.

So now that #gartnerPCC is a fading memory, it’s time to begin preparing for the next one!

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