Happy New Year, everyone. As I customarily do, I'm looking back on 2011 with an eye toward emerging trends that bear watching. In the latter half of last year, I started to receive a lot of questions from content & collaboration professionals and journalists regarding gamification. The fuel for this undoubtedly comes from businesses' burgeoning love affair with gaming dynamics in consumer web marketing efforts (chronicled by Forrester here, here, here, and here). The questions I get, though, are from individuals looking to understand if gamification has business uses outside of enticing consumers to engage more deeply with the company.

As an analyst who has covered serious gaming (the use of games and gaming dynamics to teach, change attitudes and behaviors, and inspire action) for five years, these inquiries bring a smile to my face. As you may guess, my answer to these interested parties is, "Of course you can use gamification to enhance other processes in your business." My confidence in gamification's utility to internal business processes comes from the fact that, at its core, this is an old idea in business. You might have just said "huh?" Permit me a moment to explain.

The first in a series on translation services.

The machines created this mess; let them clean it up.

On the one hand, enterprises need to make ever more content available in multiple languages. As I noted in my last post on translation, the drivers include the flood of content generated online (much of it created by consumers), the growing importance of business in emerging markets, and the desire to enable global collaboration among employees. On the other hand, advances in machine translation and new approaches such as crowdsourcing are making translation ever faster and less expensive. This is no fortunate coincidence: The very computing dynamics that enabled the Web and especially Web 2.0 -- rapid increases in processor speed, cheap storage, and high-speed networks, combined with social technologies -- also empower the latest technology-based solutions to translation and localization. 

What it means (WIM): Computers have allowed us to create a problem that only computers can help solve.

This is the first of an irregular series of blog posts on how technical advances, new solution paradigms, and evolving client needs are changing translation services and providers (TSPs). I'll begin by offering a select glossary of some of the unfamiliar terms end users encounter when they begin to investigate translation services.

MT: Machine Translation, which simply means the use of computing technologies and software to assist with the translation of content (usually text, but voice recognition is of growing importance) from one language ("the source") to another ("the target"). Machine translation takes two primary forms, namely:

I've been hearing a lot about digital strategy and digital transformation lately. (Is that what they call a tech meme?) To my ears, it sounds like a good way to get technology people and business people together to answer four important technology questions: 

1. How do I serve customers and employees on the mobile device of their choice? This one becomes even more important as smartphone and tablet adoption soars. In the US, we at Forrester expect based on our surveys that over a third of smartphones are and will be used for work and over half of tablets will be, too. Consumerization rules this roost.

What it means: Mobile devices are yet another digital touchpoint for marketing, sales, service, and product teams to master. But of course multi-touchpoint means that things must work well on all digital devices and channels: mobile, Web, social, and video.

2. How do I harness social technology for the good of customers and business productivity? IBM and Salesforce.com are betting big that social business will drive technology investment. And of course it will, though not without a fair amount of soul searching into the real sources of value on the part of business and technology people.

My colleague Gene Leganza has pulled off a consumerization coup for enterprise architects (EAs) and those who work with them. EAs must wrestle with the best way to harness the innovation of HEROes -- highly empowered and resourceful operatives (the protagonist of our book Empowered) -- while protecting the long-term interests and technology strategy of your company. To do so, they need to assess and come up with a strategy for the major consumer technologies coming in through the employee door.

Gene has done a real service to categorize and deliver a strategic assessment on the most important consumerization technologies, including business collaboration, file sync, tablets, and self-service business intelligence. He did this using Forrester's TechRadar methodology in a report titled, "TechRadar For Enterprise Architect Professionals: Technologies For Empowered Employees: Q4 2011." For content & collaboration professionals, this TechRadar includes an assessment of business collaboration, a category fueled by employee-purchased technologies such as Google Docs, Smartsheets.com, and Huddle.

Here is an excerpt on business collaboration: