Here’s an interesting stat to start the week. Forrester predicts the Enterprise 2.0 market — companies spending on everything from collaborative social networking tools to RSS to consumer payment systems utilising popular social networks (something I wrote about earlier this year for The Times Online) — will top $4.6 billion within the next five years. A thanks to ReadWriteWeb for pointing this out.

If all this is still a but fuzzy, we’re covering this in-depth on 4 June at SMI. The details are here:

IN THE WORKPLACE & BEHIND THE FIREWALL

By
now, the corporate Intranet and its control-heavy, alienating mode of
communicating should well and truly be dead. Wikis and social network
are revolutionising communication and collaboration in the enterprise,
breaking down internal walls, organisational structures and
geographical barriers. Yet, at the same time, your interns are
mobilising on Facebook. Some embarrassing snaps from the company
holiday party are still circulating on Flickr and a spoof of the big
brand campaign is attracting a crowd on YouTube. Welcome to the
workplace in the Web 2.0 era where what once stayed behind the firewall
is now being played out for all the world to see. Is this forum of
individual assertiveness a platform to discover tomorrow’s leaders or
could it sink the company’s image? This panel will discuss the
essential components required for the successful adoption of social
software in practical business settings and identify the pitfalls of
allowing the self-expression of social media forums into the workplace.

Struan Robertson, Editor, Pinsent Mason’s OutLaw.com, Lee Bryant, Director, Headshift, Niall Cook – author of Enterprise 2.0: How Social Software Will Change the Future of Work, Richard Dennison, Senior Manager Social Media, BT

– Bernhard