Sector Roadmap: Work Media Tools

1. Summary

There have been a great many changes in the competitive arena for work media since 2012, when Gigaom Research last explored the topic in-depth. This Sector Roadmap™ examines today’s still-evolving landscape for work media, focusing in particular on the impact of its three most critical areas, or what we call “Disruption Vectors:” mobility, digital culture, and contextual collaboration. Two other vectors are also examined here: intelligence/analytics/visualization and security.

Key findings in this report include:

• The promise of the web 2.0 era’s “social collaboration” offerings has fallen short, perhaps because of the shifting nature of work in an increasingly mobile world. However, it may simply be that the idealized notion embodied in that term was always out of sync with reality.
• Digital-work culture continues to evolve, largely because of the rise of mobile. Because of that, the constraints and opportunities for work media are changing rapidly. The rise of work-chat tools—Slack being the leading example of that trend—is perhaps the most obvious proof of the shift in work culture. Jive is a great example of a standalone social-collaboration company moving aggressively to meet the new realities of a mobile workforce. Other vendors—IBM, Microsoft, and Huddle—were selected for their product leadership and to exemplify the real differences in the marketplace.
• Just as in the consumer world, we see that the fracturing of the work-media user experience across a collection of independent apps is becoming more commonplace. Therefore, we will see narrow and deep applications becoming more popular while wide and shallow ones lose in popularity.

A return of focus to project-management discipline, with core work-media design elements added, animates some of the most widely adopted work-media tools, today.

Key:

• Number indicates company’s relative strength across all vectors
• Size of ball indicates company’s relative strength along individual vector

Source: Gigaom Research

Thumbnail image courtesy of -Oxford-/iStock.