Social Software in Higher Education: Reflections on Predictions

Tony Zanders

At Inigral, we have to execute against our predictions of the future. With Gartner announcing five key predictions in a press release today, we wanted to provide some color commentary on their projections.

By 2014, social networking services will replace e-mail as the primary vehicle for interpersonal communications for 20 percent of business users.

“Twenty percent” seems conservative by 2014.  One needs to account for the opportunity the rapid growth of smartphone users, at 18% in the US in 2010. As that number grows, and social networks like Facebook and LinkedIn build out their mobile counterparts on smart phones, people will be more inclined to send and receive messages through social networks, and reserve email for impersonal transactions.  While Gartner cites this to be the case for business users, what are the implications for Higher Ed Administrators? Students where market share is near complete?

By 2012, over 50 percent of enterprises will use activity streams that include microblogging, but stand-alone enterprise microblogging will have less than 5 percent penetration.

At our company, we’re huge fans of Yammer and CoTweet. Our internal microblogging is done through Yammer to share progress. For a while, some of us questioned the value of it, immediately categorizing it as another “tool of the month”. But as remote employees began using it to check-in with the rest of the team, we began to notice the value it had in building our company culture. Our external microblogging is done through Twitter, using the enterprise app CoTweet. In 2009, Twitter’s CEO Evan Williams admitted that it won’t be until 2014 when “normal people” begin to understand and use Twitter. So Gartner seems to be aligned with that.

Through 2012, over 70 percent of IT-dominated social media initiatives will fail.

Social media as a whole defies the culture of control and caution at university IT departments, with it’s emphasis on data openness and sharing. We’ve noticed a lot of independently built social networks, almost all of them chronically unsuccessful.  While it only takes one department to get started with our Schools on Facebook application, typically Marketing or Admissions show initial interest in implementing rather than IT.

Within five years, 70 percent of collaboration and communications applications designed on PCs will be modeled after user experience lessons from smartphone collaboration applications.

Designing for phones forces you to slim down and simplify.  If Snow Leopard is any indication, that’s the struggle with software now – simplifying the complexity through elegant UI and a more narrowly defined feature set.

Through 2015, only 25 percent of enterprises will routinely utilize social network analysis to improve performance and productivity.

For Higher Ed, this stat should actually be much higher.  Universities are starting to use Accepted Student Social Networks like Schools on Facebook as part of their workflow.

We’re not entirely sure how most non-univeristy enterprises could conduct social network analysis…  on what?  Their twitter account?  This sounds like they have a social network, or at least have a set of interrelated social tools that happen to generate interesting data mash ups.  We haven’t seen much of that yet.

So, after providing some color commentary on Gartner’s predictions on social software, here’s our prediction for the next five years:

By 2015, over 30% of US colleges and Universities will enhance their free social media tools with custom, enterprise applications.

What are your thoughts?