Here are the collective thoughts from the three Summit chairs on the themes for this fall's Summit.
The Web 2.0 phenomena continues to spread and influence Gartner's clients, with collaboration and social software being important categories for potential investment during the coming years. These investments are not yet large by the standards of the megavendors, with 57% investing between $10k and $500K in the coming year. However, it's significant to note that 21% of companies will invest $1 million or more in such software this year. Moreover, 45% say they will increase their spending in 2009 and 46% will stay the same. The numbers certainly aren't going down. Still, businesses remain interested in the traditional benefits that information systems can bring as a means to justify these investments, with cost control, speed of decision making, and employee productivity being the top three reasons they cite for investment.
In parallel with the rise of Web 2.0 and all its attendant hoopla, we have seen the rise of another phenomena: the continued and growing interest in governance, risk mitigation and compliance, with a plethora of regulations and laws.
Companies have been scrambling to put their houses in order - and they still are. Information systems and the people who run them, so core to everyday business operations, are also at the heart of compliance regimes. In the events survey of topics that clients would like to see covered at the next PCC conference, compliance, risk and governance are high among them. 'Information governance' in conjunction with technology management scored the highest in terms of percentage interest: 39% have a high interest in having this topic included and 61% have a medium interest, with no responders at all saying they had a low interest, unique among the questions asked.
The theme for the conference emerged from thinking about these two broad topic areas. One way to express this is "collaborative governance of user-created information." Web 2.0, participatory, open and user-created is a wonderful thing and has amazing potential both for individuals and companies. But it has now been with us long enough to expose some its flaws: anonymity leads to bad behavior; peer review and expert opinion are helpful as people seek information on the Web as their main source of input; content aggregation turns out to be WAY more profitable than content creation; most people don't check their sources, leading to a world where cut and paste libels can be spread around the world in hours; and 52 million people may be blogging, but only the tiniest percentage of those blogs are worth reading for either amusement or information.
But as we at Gartner know better than anyone, the hype cycle always runs its course. The Web 2.0, Wikipedia and Google backlash is in its infancy, but it is beginning. The criticisms of Web 2.0 'culture' are starting to emerge, but have not yet reached the mainstream. The snide comments about 'anti-social software' are making the rounds. In our Summits, we will discuss those criticisms, marry them to the positive aspects of Web 2.0 and hopefully come up with something new that will combine the best aspects of Web 2.0 and social software with the necessary consideration for governance, risk and compliance that our end user clients need.
