Social Business Revolves Around Two Key Areas

Created on Tuesday, 24 May 2011 16:33

Written by Jacob Morgan

It’s a bit hard to imagine an organization in existence that isn’t collaborative.  After all, employees talk to each other all the time in some capacity whether it’s via phone, email, or in person.  Employees also talk to partners and customers on a regular basis.  So the question of value around collaboration should be a bit obvious.  In fact, perhaps the question should be, “how can we not collaborate?”

It’s no secret that collaboration isn’t new; in fact collaboration has been around since cavemen days when groups had to hunt animals together.  So if collaboration isn’t new then what is?  What is this all really about and why is social business now becoming such an engaging and interesting topic?  The changes we are seeing today in the social business space revolve around two key areas: culture and technology.


Culture:

Over the past few years we have collectively become much more accustomed to living our lives and sharing information publicly; with friends, colleagues, and complete strangers.  We post pictures and links on Facebook, find breaking news and interesting conversations on Twitter, and tell people where we are on Foursquare.  In short, we are becoming more and more public with our lives and with our information.  Overtime people began to take their habits and methods of communicating with one another online and starting bringing it into the workplace.  Employees are starting to use cloud based (and oftentimes free) tools to help solve their problems.  If I can easily share information or get a response from my friends on something like Twitter, then why can’t I just as easily get information from employees and colleagues at work?  If I can collaborative create and edit a document with Gdocs then why can’t do something similar at work?  You can, and vendors such as Smartnet allow you to do that.  

Technology:

Platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Skype allow us to stay in touch with friends, family, and co-workers, regardless of where in the world we are.  Tools like Radian 6 allow us to monitor the web for any mentions of relevant conversations with semantic analysis and now we have full scale collaboration platforms which can be deployed at the business unit level instead of at the IT level.  Technology has allowed us to find, share, curate, and edit any piece of information which is of course especially valuable within the enterprise.  Vendors, such as Smartnet are also allowing employees to stay on top of information that is specifically relevant to them and their job function.

Together these two shifts in culture and technology are driving what we are collectively calling “social business.”  Organizations now are trying to adapt how they operate based on the context of these two changes and allowing employees to collaborate with emergent social software is a key in that adaptation.

In the next post we will explore why emergent social software is specifically valuable for enterprise collaboration.