More organizations buying social software, search and CM at the same time

Stacy Monarko [1] writes in the Vivisimo "Search Done Right" blog [2] that she was recently at the Forrester IT Forum and in one of the break-out sessions she watched a presentation by Matt Brown of Forrester. Monarko was struck by Brown's statement that 18 percent of companies were suddenly investing in search, social software and ECM all at the same time with a single strategic vision. That's not to say they were choosing a single vendor, but they were attempting to implement these three technologies at the same time.

Now on the face of this, it's an approach that makes perfect sense. You need ECM to organize the content and search to find the content and social tools to share the content, and create a kind of organic knowledge management system in the process. But does it really make sense to try and do everything at once, when implementing any one of these things is a huge task? You wonder if an organization trying to do it with a single vision may be overreaching.

Yet Monarko believes this is a sensible way to go when she writes:

"I have to agree with Brown that organizations with an overarching strategy for creating, managing and finding content are the most successful."

I would like to see data to support that supposition. Social software has really only just begun to be implemented in organizations in the last 12 to 18 months, so I think it's a little early to be saying any approach is "successful." Still, it will be interesting to watch as organizations look at a unified approach and see if the theory matches the reality. As Monarko and Brown suggest, it certainly makes sense that it would.

For more information:
- read Stacy Monarko's blog post [3]

Related Articles:
Which way will content management spending go? [4]
One on One with Kathleen Reidy of the 451 Group [5]
Should your company fear social networks? [6]
Three interesting new search tools [7]