Project ID:
RFP-2006-016
Title:
Social Networking's Impact on Business Communication and Collaboration
Summary:
Social networking and on-line collaboration in the gaming world (MySpace, Facebook, SecondLife, World of Warcraft, etc.) have experienced increasing participation for several years. The next generation of employees may expect these types of tools to have positive impact on the business environment. Questions include: "How are some of these social networking services being used today for business purposes?", "What does the future of business communication and collaboration look like based on these trends?", and "What improvements to security, policy and existing business network infrastructure will be needed to support these new forms of communication and collaboration?"
Full Description:
Looking back 5 to 10 years within enterprise business environments, enterprise Instant Messaging (IM) systems, like Microsoft Office Communicator, IBM Sametime, and Jabber, were just starting to become popular. The IM trend in corporate communication benefitted greatly from the popularity of consumer-based IM systems (AOL, Yahoo, etc.). More recent applications like WebEx and Microsoft Sharepoint applications emerged from this environment. Today, collaborative workspace software is a significant component of enterprise communication and collaboration. Examples include Microsoft's Groove and Parlano's MindAlign. These applications allow teams to share ideas using persistent chat, shared documents, etc.
Looking forward, what are the new trends in communication and collaboration? Often, new trends in the academic world can help predict the "next big thing" in enterprise communication tools. Additionally, tapping into what the youth culture is doing in North America, Europe, and Asia can help predict/anticipate emerging trends in collaboration. How will blogs, wikis, social networking, and on-line gaming influence where enterprise communication is headed? Cisco encourages research into understanding these trends and future-uses, and into anticipating what improvements to security, policy and business network infrastructure will be required to support emerging forms of communication and collaboration.
Constraints and other information:
IPR will stay with the University. Cisco expects customary scholarly dissemination of results, and hopes that promising results would be made available to the community without limiting licenses, royalties, or other encumbrances.
Proposal submission:
Cisco is not currently accepting proposals for this RFP.
Questions? Contact: research@cisco.com
