IT Chaos Means Opportunity for the CIO

Hurricanes, hybrid superstorms, earthquake-tsunami combinations, extreme heat, heavy snow in April are just a few signs of chaos. For IT professionals specifically, chaos today comes from the proliferation of smartphones and BYOD or the deluge of data under the banner of big data. A sudden shift to the deployment of massive numbers of ARM processors or extreme virtualization might trigger platform chaos.  A shortage of sufficient energy can lead to another form of chaos. Think of it this way: chaos has become the new normal.

Big consulting firms have latched onto the idea of chaos. Deloitte looks to enterprise data management to create order out of chaos. At Capgemini, the need of organizations to increasingly deal with unstructured processes that ordinary Business Process Management (BPM) solutions were not designed to cope with can be enough to lead to chaos. Their solution: developing case management around a BPM solution – preferably in conjunction with an Enterprise Content Management system – solves many of the problems

Eric Berridge, co-founder of Bluewolf Group, a leading consulting firm specializing in Salesforce.com implementations, put it best when he wrote in a recent blog that CIOs must learn to harness chaos for a very simple reason: business is becoming more chaotic. Globalization and technology, which have turned commerce on its head over the past 20 years, promise an even more dizzying rate of change in the next decade.

Berridge’s solution draws on the superhero metaphor. The CIO has to become Captain Chaos, the one able to overcome a seemingly insurmountable level of disarray to deliver the right value at the right time. And you do that my following a few straightforward tips:

First, don’t build stuff you don’t absolutely have to build. You want your organization to travel as light as possible. If you build systems you are stuck with them. Instead, you want to be able to change systems as fast as the business changes in response to whatever chaos is swirling at the moment. That means you need to aim for an agile IT infrastructure, probably one that can take tap a variety of cloud services and turn them on and off as needed.

Then, recognize the consumerization of IT and the chaos it has sparked.  This is not something to be resisted but embraced and facilitated in ways that give you and your organization the measure of control you need. Figure out how to take advantage of the consumerization of IT through responsive policies, elastic infrastructure, and flexible security capabilities.

Next, encourage the organization’s R&D and product development groups to also adopt agile methods and approaches to innovation, especially through social media and other forms of collaboration. Even encourage them to go a step further by reaching out to customers to participate.  Your role as CIO at this point is to facilitate interaction among the parties who can create successful innovation.

Finally, layer on enough just-in-time governance to enable the organization to manage the collaboration and interactivity. The goal is to rein in chaos and put it to work. To do that you need to help set priorities, define objectives, execute plans, and enforce flexible and agile policies—all the things that any successful business needs to do but do so in the context of a chaotic world that is changing in ways you and top management can’t predict.

As CIO this puts big demands on you too. To start, you have to keep your finger on the pulse of what is happening with the world at large, in business and with technology. That means you need to figuratively identify and place sensors and monitors that can tip you off as things change. You also can’t master every technology. Instead you need to identify an ever-changing stable of technology masters you can call on as needed and familiarize yourself with the vast amount of resources available in the cloud.

In the end, these last two points—a stable of technology masters you can call upon and deep familiarity with cloud resources—will enable you to deliver the most value to your organization despite the chaos of the moment. At that point you truly become Captain Chaos, the one your organization counts on to deal with ever changing chaos.

5 Things CIOs should be Thankful for This Thanksgiving

CIOs have a number of things from a technology standpoint to be thankful about. You have been reading about these technologies all year here and here.

These help you reduce costs, improve business processes, and boost your efficiency and the efficiency of your organization:

1. Virtualization—increases the utilization and flexibility of IT resources
2. Cloud computing—enables you to efficiently consume and deliver business capabilities as services
3. Mobile devices (smartphones, tablets)—un-tethers you from the constraints of the office, location, and time
4. Social business—enables new ways to get close to your customers and turn them into evangelists for your business
5. Moore’s Law—ensures that the cost of IT capabilities continues to steadily drop on a per-unit-of-work basis as it has for decades.

Are all of these unqualified, 100% gains with no downsides? Probably not (with the exception of Moore’s Law), but no organization that has benefited from any of wants to go back.  Happy Thanksgiving.

Avoid the Pitfalls of Social Networking

In an economy where innovation has become the currency for sustained competitive advantage, it also has become a truism that when companies collaborate they will innovate more often and more effectively.  Although large enterprises have long deployed complex and sophisticated collaboration tools, popular social networking tools can do as good a job.

That’s why you hear a lot about the successes big consumer product and entertainment companies are having with social networking.  P&G, for example, discovered that Facebook could pump new life into a stable but decidedly staid product, Pepto-Bismol.  Business Week wrote about it here in March.

Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) and those not so explicitly consumer oriented have found social networking success a bit more elusive.   Among midsize businesses, for instance, 38% have a company Facebook page, but less than a quarter uses it to generate new leads and sales and less than one-fifth use it for internal collaboration or customer retention, according to a recent study by the SMB Group.

The SMB 2012 study shows overall use of social media is up from 44% to 53% among small businesses (1-99 employees) and up from 52% to 63% among medium businesses (100-999 employees) year-over-year, but it also reveals a widening gap between SMBs that are using social networking in an informal, ad hoc manner and those taking a more planned, strategic approach. Here is how can you make social strategic in your organization and avoid common pitfalls.

Start by making a commitment to use social networking strategically and link it to goals for revenue growth. Strategic users, the study found, also were more likely to have already integrated social media with existing business applications and processes. CRM, customer support, and product development are the three that most immediately come to mind.

After that, you want to avoid five social networking pitfalls SMBs trip on. Kevin Casey, writing for Information Week, elaborated on them, which Bottomline IT summarizes below:

1. Not enough time. A lack of time was the clear number-one issue for small businesses, with 62% citing it as a roadblock to effective social engagement. Midsize businesses are similarly pressed.
2. Too many social networks. The time issue compounds as the number of social platforms grows. Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and others bring social networks that together complicate strategy development and execution.
3. Hard to measure. Nearly half of midsize firms report being unable to accurately measure the value of their social networking. Why define and execute a strategy if there is no effective way to evaluate progress?
4. Inappropriate tools and services. Yes, social monitoring and management tools are emerging but many are not designed for SMBs. They don’t want a comprehensive command center but something easily deployed that covers their key social activities in one simple toolset, including metrics.
5. Confusing customer sentiment. SMBs experience a deluge of social information emanating from these networks, some of it contradictory, which makes it hard to figure out what it all means. Social analysis tools are just emerging for this.

Data published in Forrester’s Global Enterprise Web 2.0 Market Forecast: 2007 to 2013, projects that enterprise spending on Web 2.0 technologies will reach $4.6 billion by 2013 and climb to $6.4 billion by 2016.  Gartner predicts that social technology will be integrated with most business applications by 2016. But, deriving value from social networking is not just about implementing Web 2.0 technology. Rather, it is about transforming a company’s knowledge-sharing culture and influencing daily behavior patterns to ensure effective adoption and exploitation of the new social tools and processes, writes Gloria Burke for Unisys.  That’s how you get true, sustainable collaboration.

Maybe the first challenge in that transformation is getting your organization to adopt of social networking at all. Corinne Sklar, marketing director at Bluewolf Group, a leading social consulting firm, has this to say on adoption: Long emails with links to how-to web pages tend to fall victim to the I’ll-get-to-it-later email black hole. Instead, innovate with new forms of communication, the more streamlined and concise the better. As attention spans diminish providing a mix of communication tools helps your people get the info they need in the kind of short, bite-sized chunks they can absorb immediately. When going social, instant gratification counts.

Social Media Gets Down to Business at Enterprise 2.0

At lasts week’s Enterprise 2.0 social networking conference in Boston, the talk got down to serious business. The fun and games of Facebook and Twitter took a back seat to using social networking for actual business work, mainly around collaboration that leads to innovation.

Here is what BottomlineIT wrote about last year’s conference. Not that it wasn’t serious, but the buzz was around networks of networks. Since then the focus has evolved. Basic social and collaboration has morphed into mobile networking and innovation with a strong focus on delivering business value.

To that end, Nathan Bricklin, head of social strategy and Wells Fargo Wholesale Services, advised attendees: “What you should have is a business strategy, and then you can layer social efforts and social tools to support the business strategy.” Nobody disagreed.

Among the vendors and speakers, several main themes emerged:  mobile everywhere, all devices welcome, connecting social to traditional business applications, and collaboration that drives business innovation.

Enterprise 2.0 this year clearly was about social for mobile devices.  If you walked around the show with a small laptop connected via WiFi you probably felt like a dinosaur. You want your social connections with you wherever you are and wherever you go. Social media has become a mobile play, no doubt.

And the products are scrambling to support any mobile device. The iPhone, iPad, Android phones and tablets, and other tablets of all sorts. Unlike previous years where the iPhone ruled, this year any device is welcome. (Your blogger was connecting via an Android smartphone.)

The vendors apparently also now understand that to make social networking acceptable to business they have to interact with traditional business applications. You couldn’t sit through a product demo without seeing how it would connect with a company’s CRM or ERP or financial systems. Pulling customer data from the CRM system and combining it with other social content to drive sales was a frequently demoed example, so was budgeting where input from numerous managers and business units were combined in a final budget.

Finally, streamlined collaboration enabled by social networking alone apparently does not deliver sufficient business value fast enough. The big business payoff from collaboration, it turns out, comes by fueling more, better, and faster innovation.  Said one vendor: “You connect social to traditional business apps and then use social to tap innovation around the periphery of the enterprise.”

The oddball at the show was Crowd Computing Systems, which seemed only marginally social. As they explained it, they join artificial intelligence with crowd sourcing to help companies select business process outsourcing (BPO) providers.  As they put it:  “By fusing human and artificial intelligence to match specific tasks to the best resources for completing them – whether human or machine – we not only make getting work done faster, we make it more scalable, predictable, flexible and accurate.” It’s an interesting idea although I’m still not sure why they were at Enterprise 2.0

Enterprise 2.0 in Boston is one of two live conferences the organization puts on each year.  The other is in Santa Clara. Starting next week the organization’s two live events will each take on their own positioning as Enterprise 2.0 Boston becomes E2 Social and Enterprise 2.0 Santa Clara becomes E2 Innovate. E2 Social will continue to spotlight the technologies and market forces within social business and collaboration, whereas E2 Innovate will look more broadly to what the influences of mobile, social, data and analytics mean for next generation enterprise applications. However it shakes out, BottomlineIT will be there next year.

The Return of ERP—Not Your Father’s ERP

Four years ago, Eric Berridge declared in his book Iterate or Die that traditional ERP systems were dinosaurs headed for extinction. He was right, but before ERP completely disappeared some products began to morph into something else. It took a few years and now we are witnessing the return of ERP. But this is not your father’s ERP.

As Gartner explains: Business applications are undergoing many changes. The realities of cloud computing, the accessibility provided by mobile technologies, and the impact of social paradigms are affecting the business application environment. And ERP is the business application most affected.

The recent recession and painstakingly slow recovery hurt the ERP business. Even worse, the costly, cumbersome, inflexible, outdated ERP systems the vendors were hawking hurt the businesses saddled with them. Now the survivors are creeping back and finding a radically changed ERP landscape.

ERP systems run many companies. Your company probably has one or, more likely, several. They combine business process with software and integrate numerous critical back-office functions across a company. The tight integration of the various functions and the use of a common database gave ERP systems their power to coordinate the organization’s core activities based on a single set of shared, consistent data. Having multiple ERP systems certainly complicates things but with decentralized organizations or those that inherited multiple ERP systems along with acquisitions and never got around to standardizing, it is a mess many, sadly, continue to struggle with.

The ERP idea is still good, but the old implementations were too costly, too slow to implement, and too rigid, and hard to use. Rather than help the business they prevented organizations from changing quickly. Today, the inability to change fast is disastrous. That’s why Berridge titled his book Iterate or Die. Many businesses that failed to heed his words did just that.

The latest twist to the ERP saga has been the marriage of ERP with social networking. As one ERP observer put it: Social media and ERP make good financial sense. Not only is social media being taken seriously as a proper business tool, but useful new tools, especially when engaging in conversation with customers, are emerging. For example, Salesforce.com acquired Radian6, which focuses on B2C needs, effectively allowing companies to participate in consumer conversations on the social web.  Expect to see a bigger convergence of CRM and social media. The integration of the enterprise CRM and Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn will allow organizations to bolster both internal and external customer relationship functions.

When Berridge wrote his book he mainly had in mind Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).  SaaS has moved into the mainstream for ERP, CRM, supply chain management, and financial systems.  Notes Roger Borek, Borek Business Solutions, a Microsoft ERP provider, the growth of SaaS ERP software is accelerating and analysts predict continued growth of through 2012. For most companies, this hosted delivery model requires no initial cash outlay for IT resources while enabling a faster software implementation, on-demand scalability, and improved ROI. These factors collectively reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) and accelerate time-to-market benefits.

Typical of the new breed of ERP is Plex Online, ERP for manufacturers, and NetSuite, an integrated collection of SaaS applications including ERP.

Compare that to the ERP of the past that took armies of consultants several years to implement and tailor to the company’s needs at a cost of millions of dollars.  And even then many went widely unused, giving rise to the pejorative term shelfware.

The new ERP ideally will incorporate social networking, add gamification to make it easy to use and measure, and deliver it as a SaaS offering to make it fast and cost efficient. Gamification, notes Gartner, will drive process innovation—that’s something you would never associate with the old ERP. The result certainly won’t be your father’s ERP.

Technology Trends for 2012

The big technology trends in 2012 will be extensions of trends that began in 2011 or earlier.  For example, BottomlineIT noted the Consumerization of IT  back in September. Expect it to pick up speed in 2012. Similarly you read about The Internet of Things here back in February. That too will drive technology trends in 2012.

The big IT research firms published their trends projections for 2012. You can find Gartner’s here.  Maybe more interesting to a CIO will be IDC’s security trends for 2012 here.

The tech trends below are based on the numerous vendor briefings and conferences BottomlineIT attends as well as talking with dozens of IT and business managers. Most shouldn’t surprise you if you have been reading BottomlineIT, but a few might.

Here are the technology trends for 2012:

BYOD—smartphones mainly and other devices. The twist is the growing adoption of Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) in which workers are encouraged to bring their personal smartphones to work while IT will be asked to support a range of popular devices, selectively open interfaces to data and applications, and insist on a certain level of security, such as data encryption. The business will have to resolve reimbursement issues, currently policies vary from zero to all.

Social Networking for Business—will only grow in the coming year.  Social networking is the way the next generation of workers live and increasingly work.  Businesses will want to identify and capitalize on opportunities in social networking starting with collaboration.

The Internet of Things—the digital transformation of the economy continues as chips are embedded in more things from consumer appliances to packaging materials, allowing companies to meter and monitor processes and activity. RFID is just the start. Watch for more digital instrumentation appearing.

 Automated, Real-time Data Analytics—a part of the Big Data trend. Expect to see the growing adoption of advanced data analytics, which increasingly will be automated to keep up with the high volume and in near-real time to allow for dynamic data-based decision-making. And the analytics will be baked in, relieving the business from having to maintain a stable of PhD quants.

Bio-metric Authentication—passwords provide poor security. Watch for increased adoption of bio-metrics in the form of fingerprints, retina scans, facial/voice recognition, and such to replace the use of passwords for authentication.

The Cloud goes Mainstream—most companies will develop a cloud strategy at some level, whether for backup to the cloud, SaaS, to augment existing capabilities, or something else.

Virtualized Enterprise—look for increasing virtualization of every digital aspect of the enterprise, from data networking to voice communications.

Solid state memory for storage—in one form or another solid state memory will be an increasing part of almost every storage strategy as costs continue to drop and vendors get better at integrating it into the products to boost performance.

Further out:

Electronic Wallets—smart devices, including smartphones, used for almost anything from buying a can of soda to proving who you are. Big vendors already are fighting over who provides the e-wallet. Think you worry about security now? This merits close scrutiny.

Geo-Location—between smart devices and GPS look for businesses increasingly to take advantage of geographic data, first for marketing (combined with QR codes) and then much more.

In-memory Computing—combining processing with memory speeds performance.  Expect to see entire databases processed in memory.

Gamification—applying aspects of computer gaming to business software offers the possibility of more compelling and engaging business applications.  Could ERP be improved through gamification? For sure.

However things shake out, 2012 should be an interesting year for technology, and BottomlineIT will stay on top of it.

Productivity vs. Security: Find the Right Balance

Security concerns around IT systems seem to only get worse. Now organizations must contend with cloud computing, social networking, and mobile computing, all of which ratchet up security concerns. Of course, you can boost security but business will suffer. Restrict social networking and risk losing customers. Let managers access data from smartphones and risk compromising data.

“When Security is around, Productivity disappears. And when Productivity shows up on the scene, Security has to take a coffee break,” writes Aaron Weiss for Dell here.

Workers aren’t stupid. They feel the pressure from management to do more, work harder, work faster, no excuses. They know it is a tough economy; layoffs could come at any time. So they take shortcuts, and a handy place to find those shortcuts is security. How can you strike the right balance?

Here are five telltale signs workers are opting for expediency over security:

1. Passwords hidden in the most obvious places—convenient, easy to find by anyone, almost never changed
2. Leaving a workstation, even for a few minutes, with a session running and connection open—anyone who sits down can do anything
3. Putting data unencrypted on insecure, easily misplaced devices (laptops, smartphones, tablets, flash cards)—usually in an effort to be more productive
4. Sending confidential data unencrypted via email—no guaranteed delivery, no assurance the recipient will be the one opening it, no control of the data after it passes the firewall
5. Failure to follow social media policy—spontaneous discussions with little awareness of security and confidentiality implications

In each case convenience, usually in the name of productivity, trumps security. It is faster and easier to do it this way, workers reason.

But don’t blame the workers. Management, too, sends clear signals that security is less important than productivity:

1. Lack of a security policy and social media policy that reflect how efficient workers actually operate
2. Failure to cultivate security awareness through regular communication and training
3. Reluctance to invest in automated security tools that remove much of the burden of complying with security policy
4. Failure to model and enforce proper security behavior, with accountability for security lapses
5. Unreasonable productivity demands that drive workers to take careless shortcuts

When management by its actions conveys the message that throughput is more important than sensible protection of valuable data and systems assets inevitably productivity will trump security.

Here are signs the security-productivity issue risks falling out of balance, notes Rakkhi Samaresekera here.  The most obvious, of course, is a major security incident. Before you suffer that, however, consider minor security incidents or near-misses as warnings that something is amiss. This might be an increase in thefts of laptops or more frequent virus attacks.

Audit reports should give you a good sense of potential security problems. Don’t just bury these in a file folder that never gets opened. Similarly, have consultants periodically assess current security in light of industry best practices. Again, once you get the report, don’t ignore it.

There are, however, proactive things you can do to enable security without killing productivity or triggering a worker revolt. For example, you can deploy single sign-on which greatly expedites application and data access while reducing the need to manage passwords. To get rid of passwords altogether, you can implement bio-metric authentication. It’s a bit pricey, but once deployed users reportedly love it. Also consider automated ID management tools to rein in multiple worker IDs and roles. Finally, make sure the help desk knows to respond fast when workers have trouble with passwords or otherwise get tangled in security.

Start to minimize the conflict between security and productivity by streamlining business processes within the context of effective security practices with the input of workers. This includes the new employee on-boarding process too. And new tools, as noted above, can eliminate the most cumbersome aspects of security. Of course, all of this requires an investment of time and budget. The payoff, however, is security with productivity.

Measuring the ROI for Social Networks

Business use of social networks, also referred to as social media or just plain social business, refers to the use of the Internet in myriad forms to interact with the organization’s various stakeholders. These typically are employees, suppliers, partners, or customers.

IBM describes a social business as one that “embraces networks of people to create business value.” It involves sharing, transparency, innovation, and two-way interaction. The objective is improved communications and collaboration that should lead to higher productivity, improved products and services, better decision making, and ultimately greater revenue, market share, and profits. Social business is a key component of IBM’s 2011 Tech Trends Report, here.

A recent University of Massachusetts survey, here, on Fortune 500 companies found that they already were engaged in social networking: 23% had an active public-facing corporate blog, 62% had active corporate Twitter accounts, and 58% had Facebook pages. In addition, companies have been deploying social networking tools like Yammer or IBM Connections in house. All this social networking raises the question: What’s the ROI?

The IBM Trends study suggested that the majority of organizations turned to social networking mainly to benefit from increased efficiency and to streamline collaboration. Often the companies began by deploying social networking internally (behind the corporate firewall). Even if they have outward facing Facebook, Twitter, or corporate blogs, the serious experimenting with social business was happening safely inside the company.

These initial deployments had three primary uses: 1) employee collaboration, 2) efficiency in locating people and resources, and 3) idea generation and sharing. The technologies they mainly used were file sharing, blogs, and online (intranet) forums. Nothing unusual or complicated or costly. Many of the social networking products like Yammer even are free for individuals, which is why workers may sign up on their own. (The enterprise versions entail charges but deliver more capabilities.)

Figuring out the ROI for social networking is challenging. People have always collaborated. If you collaborate a little bit faster or a little bit more easily than before what is the incremental value gained? To understand the ROI of social networking you need to look at it as a business process, not as an IT project.

Rather than try to calculate a technology ROI, you need to look at the return on collaboration and the value of knowledge access and skill sharing. If a streamlined collaboration process enables employees to work more efficiently or more productively, there is value that should be measurable. Similarly, if social media enables the organization to more efficiently find and tap the knowledge and skills of its workers and share that widely and more quickly, again there should be something that can be measured and given a value.

What is the value of a better interaction with a customer or with a valued partner or supplier?  These are areas where social networking can help. Or, what is the value of learning what people think of you or your products, good or bad? Again, this where social networking can help.

At a recent social media gathering a manager from Lowe’s, the home improvement store, described its use of IBM Connections. Mainly employees use it to locate other employees who have specific knowledge about a product or problem. The value came from the ease and speed by which an employee could find the information needed to satisfy a customer. In some cases, it might save a sale. In other cases, Lowe’s would have gotten the sale anyway. But overall, the interaction process with the customer improved.  Social media, he insisted, simply requires a different way of looking at ROI.

In an upcoming piece BottomlineIT will look at guidelines and practices for getting the most out of social media.

Enterprise 2.0 Introduces a World of Networks of Networks

Enterprise 2.0, the annual conference focused on social media, was held in Boston this week with IBM, Cisco, and Microsoft as major sponsors. The conference makes available a wealth of useful information, mainly in the form of white papers and videos of the keynote presentations, for free. Check it out here.

Last year, the conference focused on the search for the social media killer app for business. The growing consensus then was collaboration. BottomlineIT’s sister blog for CFOs covered it here.

This year collaboration is a given. Some other interesting themes, however, emerged in conversations with various key players. For example, Cisco’s Murali Sitaram observed that the world appears to be rapidly evolving into a network of networks. What might that imply for your business?

Social media at its core is about creating networks. Facebook, the largest social network by far, enables its subscribers to create networks of friends among whom they communicate. Twitter, the social media micro-blogging giant, lets its subscribers post their thoughts in 140-character snippets, which are distributed to a network of followers who are encouraged to pass them on.  Within minutes a message can go viral, expanding exponentially.

Vendors are jumping into the social media space with products that, in one way or another, let people and companies create networks, expand on existing networks, or better manage their rapidly growing and multiplying networks. People and companies end up participating in multiple networks. The result, as Sitaram noted, is a world consisting of networks of networks. Between your employees, partners, and customers, you already are involved in many networks. Once aware of these networks, you can exploit them to advance mutually beneficial objectives. That’s essentially what President Obama did to get elected.

Yammer, another Enterprise 2.0 player, provides companies with what amounts to the ability to set up a Facebook-like social media environment within the company. In fact, companies can set up multiple Yammer groups; one for finance, another for budgeting, still another for procurement. You can set up yet a different Yammer group to bring in external partners.

The Yammer groups don’t replace your existing enterprise applications. Those systems—ERP, CRM, HR, supply chain management, procurement, and such—remain the systems of record. Instead it becomes part of a new, complementary category of systems referred to as systems of engagement. These are the social networking systems you will use increasingly to engage and collaborate with employees, partners, customers, and other stakeholders.

At this point, social networking is about managing the engagement experience. Hank Barnes, principal in Adobe’s customer experience management group, suggests a goal of social networking is to turn customers into advocates. Citing a Harvard Business Review article by Roger Martin titled The Age of Customer Capitalism Barnes suggests managers need to change how their companies engage with customers. The way to do that is social networking. Martin’s article demonstrates how companies that focus primarily on delivering customer value do better in the long run than companies that primarily aim to create shareholder value.

The business social networking market is hot. IBM, in launching its new IBM Connections, a social networking platform for business with real-time compliance capabilities, noted that IDC has projected social platforms to be a $2 billion market by 2014. Gartner, meanwhile, reported  that by the end of 2013, half of all companies will have been asked to produce material from social media websites for e-discovery. The conclusion: social networking for business clearly has arrived.