I just returned from a tour in Australia that took me from Brisbane to Canberra to Melbourne to Sydney where I met with 25 organizations in five days (which is why I have not posted much in the past few weeks).
Most of my meetings concerned SOA and many of the orgs were in the midst of or just beginning SOA initiatives. Very few were interested in social software and the couple that were interested were in the very early stages.
A few of them brought up Burton Group’s “SOA is Dead” shock marketing campaign [my categorization not theirs] and were concerned that their efforts are now somehow obsolete. I addressed Burton Group’s bad analyst behavior (I consider sensationalizing to be bad analyst behavior. Leave that to CNN 
and assured them that SOA was alive and thriving.
Why Enterprise 2.0 (social software use by the enterprise) isn’t catching on down under is an interesting question. I had a quick discussion with a local Oz analyst and we postulated that, since Australia is relatively small, maybe they don’t see the value in mass collaboration. I fully admit that this is speculation and I’m not saying that there is no value in Enterprise 2.0 for Australia because of its size. On the contrary, engaging effectively with the broader community can give smaller organizations the Web presence of much larger ones and can pay solid dividends. Australia doesn’t quite seem there yet. Maybe when I’m back to Australia in November I’ll investigate further.
These are observations from my trip and 25 organizations is not representative of the entire country. Any thoughts on my observations?
These posts are from the Gartner Blog Forum. For more please go here:
http://blogs.gartner.com/anthony_bradley/2009/06/2...