Choosing the right social software tools that allow organizations to capitalize on the "social" dimension of work is a challenge. To help users select the right tool, IT professionals should focus on clarifying the use case these tools support rather than specific technical functions.

• A culture of collaboration and knowledge sharing are prerequisites for effective use of social software tools.
• How the tools will be used and the desired outcomes are more important than the features and functions of individual tools.
• The functions of tools may overlap, yet support different uses. For example, idea management tools and prediction markets can both be used in support of innovation programs but idea management tools help an organization collect a series of divergent viewpoints while prediction markets are better at converging on a solution or outcome.

Before you move forward with projects to use social software to tap the collective, you need to ensure:

• You have the right environment to get the levels of participation from the collective you desire.
• People have the necessary skills to interpret the intelligence that can be gained from the collective and there is a plan for using the information.

This report is part of a new research theme on "pattern-based strategy." This research explores the factors, approaches and technologies that can enable business leaders to actively seek, amplify, examine and exploit patterns. Seeking patterns will require new disciplines and technologies that identify patterns of change that indicate opportunity or risk. We suggest that clients read "Introducing Pattern-Based Strategy" as an introduction to this topic theme.

Organizations are always looking for new and innovative ways to uncover and exploit the intelligence inherent in the collective. Gartner defines the collective as the sum of all the external signals — and all the signals that emerge from non-traditional internal sources such as those being discussed in this report. The collective comprises individuals, groups, communities, mobs, markets and firms that shape the direction of society and business. The collective is not new but technology has made the collective more powerful. Affordable and accessible technology has enabled individuals and communities to come together in a new way — and enabled change to happen more rapidly. This report examines social software tools that will help organizations gain new insight and information from the collective. It is a companion report to "How to Help Workers Pick the Right Social Software Tools for Their Tasks."

Because so many of the social software tools seem to support similar use cases, business leaders often ask the IT organization for help in choosing the right tool for the purpose they need to accomplish. When IT professionals advise users about social software tools, they should pay attention to three issues:

1. What the desired outcomes for using the social software tools are.
2. What social software tools do well.
3. What other factors need to be considered when dealing with the collective.

The deployment of social software will be more successful if organizations focus on how the tools will be used and what the desired outcomes are rather than just considering the technical features the tools offer. The functions of tools may overlap, yet support different uses. For example, idea management tools and prediction markets can both be used in support of innovation programs, but idea management tools help an organization collect a series of divergent viewpoints while prediction markets are better at converging on a solution or outcome. Table 1 summarizes the best outcomes of social software tools that are commonly used to tap the collective.

Some readers may have expected to see other tools such as collaborative authoring, or conversational tools included in this report. For a discussion of additional social software tools, see "How to Help Workers Pick the Right Social Software Tools for Their Tasks."

Many factors complicate the challenge of picking the right social software tool for the job. The variety of different tools and products available can be confusing and the hype around innovation and social networking has made some organizations think they cannot be effective without the technology.

Idea management tools are not new, but they have experienced a resurgence of interest as more and more organizations seek innovation in a time of economic uncertainty. The first tools for idea management — sometimes referred to as ideation — were optimized for the collection of ideas from employees. They were marketed as being a preferable alternative to using e-mail to ask a broad distribution list whether they had any suggestions about how to solve a problem. In some instances the tools were installed as an "open suggestion box" in which anyone at anytime could deposit that gem of an idea. As the tools evolved, they became better at the critical nexus of innovation — allowing users to collaborate on the development and build-out of each others' ideas. This unleashed a much richer stream of insight from the collective because users were able to view, comment on and refine the suggestions of colleagues. Today's idea management tools usually include some capability to rate and rank ideas. What most tools still lack is a robust analysis function that organizations can use to understand the trade-offs and prioritize a portfolio of ideas.

• When to use: idea management tools are best applied when organizations are looking for insight from a diverse group of employees, customers or partners. Participants responding to an idea management campaign would be authenticated by the application and be able to collaborate with others to improve the quality of an idea or prioritize the ideas submitted.

Idea marketplaces are innovation environments run by brokers that facilitate the open exchange of ideas and expertise. The typical model for an idea marketplace — sometimes called open innovation networks — is to help a seeker who has a problem find the solvers who have the needed expertise. The exchange is brokered in the idea marketplace. The goal is that all the parties in the transaction — the seeker, the solver and the broker — get what they want from the interaction. Typically, the seeker is looking for an answer from people outside "the four walls" because they have exhausted the usual channels of innovation and insight at their disposal. The solvers can literally be anywhere and contribute their intellectual capital when they feel they have something to contribute that will solve the seeker's problem. The idea marketplace owner brokers an arrangement agreeable to the seeker and solver, and receives a fee for their service.

• When to use: idea marketplaces are invoked by organizations that are specifically seeking ideas from outside their organization and need assistance in locating and tapping into new sources of insight in the collective. The idea marketplace owner manages the transaction including the negotiations regarding the rights to and appropriate compensation for intellectual property.

Prediction markets are mechanisms that collect opinions or bets from a group of people who speculate on whether a particular scenario will occur. Prediction markets — also known as information markets or event futures — can be used to project the likelihood of anything from the probability that a project will complete successfully to the amount of product a company will sell by a given date. Prediction markets are structured as betting exchanges in which participants offer their opinion with their bets. The contract specifies how the payoff will be determined, and those placing the bets can be rewarded if a specific event occurs as well as if some threshold is reached. Prediction markets were all the rage early in the decade but then lost favor when critics complained about a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency plan to create what was called a "terrorism futures" market. Prediction markets are often used in conjunction with idea management campaigns. After the campaign accumulates a wide variety of disparate ideas, the prediction market helps the organization converge on the most promising opportunities. Some organizations use prediction markets internally and Google documented its use of the technique (http://battellemedia.com/archives/004193.php ). However, despite the accuracy of the predictions, most organizations are indifferent to them.

• When to use: prediction markets are useful for estimating a group's expectations of an outcome. They are a more structured means of garnering insight than open-ended tools such as a wiki where individual thoughts are more random. They take some effort to set up, manage and run so organizations need to determine if the effort is worth it.

Expertise engines are functions that allow users to ask questions and receive answers to their queries from colleagues and the collective. Expertise engines — sometime called expertise location systems — are often included as a component of another social software application such as a collaboration platform or corporate learning system. Expertise engines map the question from the person looking for knowledge to the social profile and to other explicit information such as documents and work projects to find the expert who can provide an answer. In addition, contextual information such as availability, previous ratings, response times and the expert's workload settings is considered. The expertise engine notifies the experts that their expertise is being requested using the communication mechanisms indicated by the experts. It also tracks the disposition of the request, notifying other experts when a question has been answered and tracking other parameters about the exchange. Expertise engines provide an alternative to sending e-mails to a broad distribution list to fish for someone to answer a question.

• When to use: expertise engines are valuable in organizations where knowledge workers need a structured approach for uncovering the expertise of colleagues. They depend on federated search to return results from across multiple knowledge stores and filters to narrow the results by select criteria such as location, date, tags or availability.

Social analytics is a category of business intelligence that collects and reports information about the social dimensions of people working in networks. Social analytic tools are often included as part of a social software application. The social analytics tool aggregates, monitors and reveals information on topics such as the level of engagement in an internal community of practice (for example, percentage of active participants vs. total population of the community), skill levels (for example, how many customer service reps are trained on cloud computing in Europe) and trends (for example, what shifts in market demand are the sales reps in China seeing). When social analytics are collected about an online customer community, it is often referred to as social media monitoring and analytics services. (This report will not cover social media monitoring and analytic services. Instead, see "Social Media Delivers Marketing Intelligence" and "Charting the Social Media Marketing Landscape.") Social analytics should be used carefully; there is still the perception by some that they are too intrusive and in certain geographies, employees must give explicit permission before information can be collected.

• When to use: social analytics give an organization insight into activities and interactions that can be used to make fact-based decisions on a variety of topics. For example, an organization might want to make adjustments to its metrics if it finds a low level of engagement from employees in its communities of practice, or add additional training for technologies that appear to be the "next new thing."

Social network analysis is a methodology for exploring the information flows and relationships among people, groups and other information processing entities. Social network analysis is a specific discipline of social analytics. The process of social network analysis is a purposeful study of social networks to glean information, gain insight and develop an action plan based on that insight (see "Social Network Analysis: What A Difference an 'A' Makes"). A social network map will reveal the position people play in the network such as central connector, boundary spanners and peripheral players. Social network analysis can be used to examine interactions within an organization (organizational network analysis), among organizations (value network analysis) or across social networks (influence analysis). Before undertaking a social network analysis, the organization must establish the goals for the effort and determine what changes it will make based on the results of the analysis (see "Five Case Study Examples of Social Network Analysis").

• When to use: An organization might want to undertake a social network analysis project to make an organizational adjustment in response to a business process management transformation, increase the knowledge capacity of the organization, or encourage knowledge sharing across the organization. Social network analysis tools are available to create the network diagrams based on survey data or from artifacts such as e-mail communication and documents.

The hype surrounding social software means that many organizations are rushing to creating initiatives that tap the intelligence of individuals, teams and networks. However, before you move forward you should make sure you address the following issues:

Do you have the right environment to achieve the level of participation from the collective you desire? The essence of the social software applications discussed in this report is the ability to allow a diverse group to share information and insight, whether to suggest a new product development opportunity or answer a colleague's question. While this capability sounds enticing, organizations need to ask themselves whether they have the right culture, leadership, processes and metrics to encourage and sustain collaborative behaviors (see Figure 1). The organization needs to be more than just intrigued by social software applications; it must have a proven track record for maintaining trusting relationships, collaborating and knowledge sharing. It must also have processes that encourage participation and incentives that recognize people's individual and collective contributions.

Do you have a plan for using the intelligence gained from the collective? When the right environment for collaboration is established and the social network is actively participating, a torrent of good ideas can emerge. However, organizations need to make sure they have a plan for using the intelligence that can be gained from the collective. For example, if you run an idea management challenge looking for new ways to market a product, how will you evaluate, prioritize, select and fund the best idea from the campaign? If a prediction market determines a certain project will fail, are you willing to shut it down? If a social network analysis uncovers a communication gap between two teams working on the same topic, what actions will you take to remedy the situation?

Acting on the insight provided by the collective requires the ability to analyze the information, some of which may come from weak signals (see "Context-Aware Computing: The Link With Social Networking"). It will also test an organization's facility for collaborative decision making and its ability to manage ambiguity (see "The Rise of Collaborative Decision Making"). See "Hype Cycle for Social Software, 2009" for a listing of vendors that offer the tools covered in this report.

"How to Help Workers Pick the Right Social Software Tools for Their Tasks"

"Hype Cycle for Social Software, 2009"

"Context-Aware Computing: The Link With Social Networking"

"The Rise of Collaborative Decision Making"

"Devise 'Use Cases' Before Choosing Collaboration Software"

"Seven Key Characteristics of a Good Purpose for Social Software"

"Social Software Tools Give Researchers New Ways to Collaborate"

"Socialization of Knowledge Management Drives Greater Reuse"

"Five Eras of IT Business Value Add: From Automation to Pattern-Based Strategy"

"Five Pitfalls of Ideation and Best Practices for Avoiding Them"

"Idea Marketplaces: Access to a World of Innovation"

This research is part of a set of related research pieces. See Roundup of Business Intelligence and Information Management Research, 3Q09 for an overview.