The thing that struck me while reading this post is the fact that we seem to be backing into developing tools that really meet the requirements of their users. As my colleague Larry tweeted regarding this article:
Although culture and change management in the enterprise play a factor in the success of collaboration within an organization, I'm also struck by the way social software is being developed in both the enterprise software and consumer spaces. As Ms. Buczek points out, collaboration in business goes beyond the firewall, and those who "get it" are turning to consumer tools to get things done. But while the consumer developers are trying to attract enterprise and figure out the "new e-mail" (which looks a lot like e-mail from 1990), enterprise software vendors are busy trying the reconstitute social media in their own style with a 1990's development model.
And so it goes, the primary ingredients that Ms. Buczek enumerates,
1. Integrated interfaces
2. Cross-organizational interaction
3. Streamlined identity
4. Device agnostic tools
fall by the wayside to serve the bipartisan consumer versus enterprise approach to software development and delivery. As Ms Buczek notes, there are lots of places we can start.
1 comment:
IBM's meme-push on "get social, do business" is interestingly reminiscent of Lotus' mid-90's "Work the Web" ad series with Dennis Leary.
On one level, it makes sense: social media infrastructure can support business activity as well as purely "social" actvity. After all, "business" is a form of social interaction, no?
Your analogy to "Knowledge Management" (a great idea which collapsed under the weight of incomprehensibility imposed upon it by stupid software) is a good one: the real challenge of "social business" will be how to keep it from devolving into spam.
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