Tag: social collaboration

  • Evolution of Enterprise 2.0

    In the last post  – on defining social collaboration – I had also applied it in the context of social business. It was a brief mention and I did describe it as a utopian thought at this stage. However it reminded me of a debate late last year on Social Business and Enterprise 2.0, because ‘collaborative tools’ found mention then. The reasons for the debate notwithstanding, it was still interesting.

    It began with a post from Andrew McAfee, written in favor of Enterprise 2.0 and in which he pretty much called ‘social business’ geriatric. 🙂 Stowe Boyd shot back with this post, giving his definition of social business and insisting that the nomenclature was important.In keeping with my generally agreeable nature, I subscribe to parts of both thoughts. Social business as an idea is indeed old, but its adoption has been patchy at best. The ‘social’ tools of this era can enable greater, better and more consistent adoption, as there is indeed much potential for synthesis when people, processes and technology meet. Because of this, the manifestation of ‘social business’ would be new.

    But in my mind, there is quite a dichotomy between Social Business and Enterprise 2.0 anyway, primarily because of intent, and therefore the way they’re pitched as ideas. To use them interchangeably would be doing injustice to both. Enterprise 2.0 focuses on using social technologies to address the objectives of the organisation. But Social Business has a larger role and (for the purpose of a direct comparison) would involve setting organisational objectives with a social-societal perspective and a purpose that people can identify with. In Hugh MacLeod’s words, “the need to belong  to something that matters”.

    Is one better than the other? I don’t think so and it is perhaps not an apt comparison. Enterprise 2.0 is perhaps a better fit (relatively) to the current organisational frameworks, while Social Business is much more radical. But it is quite possible that over a period of time, an organisation that adopts Enterprise 2.0 will transform into a Social Business. As for social collaboration, it is a process that can fit well into both.

    until next time, a social enterprise 🙂

  • Social Collaboration eg.

    My friend via Twitter, Prem, (twice over, because both his handles are friends :D) got me thinking on ‘Social Collaboration’ ever since he wrote this post, attempting to define the term as used by its vendors. Despite a good discussion in the comments, a definition proved elusive. Though I began to agree with Prem’s assessment that ‘social’ was redundant, Gautam’s post on it did offer an interesting line of thought –  that ‘social collaboration’ was emergent. He illustrates it with an example too. This was vaguely similar to one one of the ways in which I had tried to define the phrase, before I gave up. Here are the attempts.

    The first was by tying it to the idea of a ‘social business’ (not the wiki one, but the Dachis group version), where 2 or more businesses collaborate on an objective that may be larger/ unrelated to their individual objectives. Obviously, this is more utopian than any vendor’s idea, so I dropped it.

    Which led me to the second attempt, where I thought  the tools of the (enterprise) social web would enable social interaction in various contexts and collaboration would be one of the products. (Probably like what Krish Ashok is building at TCS?) This would be around the premise that Gautam presented – even identifying the need would be the result of the social interactions and collaboration would follow.

    While on this, I was reminded of Google Wave, where each participant could ‘drag’ people into a conversation. There were several instances when I, as an initiator of the conversation, did not have any control over the quantity or quality of the participants or even the morphing of the intent. I was also reminded of the last paragraph of this post I wrote in 2008, when Yammer came into the limelight – “..a bridge between Yammer and Twitter. One service that allows absolute transparent conversations within the organisations, and another that allows brands and organisations to be transparent with its end users.”A one way channel did open later. If any collaborator could ‘drag’ in another collaborator from a social web outside of the enterprise’ social web eg. a customer from Twitter, could that be social collaboration? On a related note, I also remember another post of mine when I came across Memolane and wrote about brand-streams connecting consumers and the enterprise. A couple of days back Memolane released an embeddable version which it hopes will be adopted by organisations.

    Alternately/further, could it be like what happened right now – where neither Prem nor Gautam invited me to collaborate, but I did nevertheless, inserting myself into it thanks to having access to their thoughts, having a take (hopefully) on a thought Prem started and being able to connect it back to them. (forget Twitter, their blogs will have trackbacks) Even if they do ignore me and refuse to collaborate, my take would still exist, available to all who might be interested? That’s probably not what the sellers intended of ‘social collaboration’, but could that be what it evolves into?

    I don’t know, and that’s why for now, I have parked this aside. 🙂

    until next time, continue collaborating..

    PS: Bonus Read – How Cisco integrates social media into the organisation

    PPS: Back in a fortnight 🙂