Part III. Creating The Common Treasury

This is part three  in the multi part mini-series and a follow up to Part II – “Business is Social…again?” where I concluded, much to the chagrin of many that Social Software is not social at all. This follow up will hopefully remove the chagrinnery of the prior post by re-establishing that social software tools are an important fabric of the future organization – though in a form not recognizable to where you are now.  You are now in the early throes of adoption,change, and social software development in the enterprise.

So if social media software  is not social, then what is it? And does it have a place in the Enterprise ? To be fair, this question is deliberately misleading. It is, after all, less a question of whether social software has a place in the enterprise and more whether the enterprise has a use for social software. Furthermore, the question is ultimately who defines where the social software ends and enterprise software ends or are they actually extensions of the same thing.

What is social media software in a business context or is everything just enterprise software?

What is Social Software (this blog’s definition baseline)

Social software can loosely be defined as applications that allow for the sharing of data and have come to be most recognized as the sharing of highly irrelevant data such as you would find on Twitter, Facebook, Instant Messaging and of course the platform that brings you this blog (to emphasise the irrelevancy I include myself).

This unfocused social software doesn’t often fall into any categorization or purport to be of any particular use, which is not to say that it doesn’t ever achieve something, but that it’s generically just a vehicle for communication. It is this lackluster definition that provides for the overall head scratching on the defining value. This head scratching has become all the more relevant and pertinent given the new breed of software being created, marketed and sold with the promise of a more engaged and effective work-force.

But social software is and will be so much more.  It becomes the very foundation of doing business.  Its impact will be in every nook and cranny of every business.

Function Over Form

What exactly is relevancy? How do we measure the value of the contribution to business?

The question is important because the lack of this measurement was one of the underlying impediments to universal adoption of social software.  It took vision to put paid to question like – “Isn’t blogging at work wasting time?”; “Should we make sure the content of the blog is relevant?”;  “Who makes the decisions? Do we need editors? Is this editing censorship?”

The future of the enterprise society depended on careful balancing and reconciliation of social versus work. Hindsight, being 20-20, would have prevented anyone ever tagging the platforms and ideas with the word social. That was an unfortunate tag because we are employed to work, not socialize! People will claim that work is social but some words are attached to an immediate emotional meaning:  a lot of business is socialist in nature; however, we don’t use that to describe what we do!

So why did you have difficulty with adoption? The social evangelistas obviously saw the title of social software as one of the obstacles and one of the quick ways to imply relevance is a quick name change: they added extra words to the generic term of Social Software to garner some instant corporate karma:

Social Software + Business = Social Business Software

Now isn’t that better!

Somewhat, I think. I prefer Collaborative and Engaging Software Solutions (in part because no company has claimed ownership of that name like they have SBS….) but then what is collaboration….*sigh*… luckily a new name came along soon enough.

But along with the name change you would hear promises.  BIG promises along the lines of:

If you add layers of sophistication to the generic social software platforms you get collaborative social software solutions. Take a messenger and add some meeting capabilities, some file sharing, some idea sharing functions and you get the basis of sharing environment, a creativity sandbox if you will. Take that sandbox, integrate it into a dashboard, then profilize your employees and you have a collaborative platform. Not a software platform but a people platform. Your workers are plugged in and ready to work together. All those disparate processes and methodologies you have? Gone. Vanished. Disappeared into the ether of non-connectedness. You have created connections.

Your organizational chart had solid lines and dashed lines but now you have virtual lines and they cross all boundaries! You are modern, you are agile… you can sit back and watch the growth as your teams finally engage and work together. Your targets and goals can be unified and communicated clearly! You have enabled instant updates, feedback, and idea alliances. All these things are operating as part of the fabric of your enterprise… you have the seized the ability to increase cross silo productivity, enhance teamwork, infuse new ideas, increase skill and creative utilization.

With those enhancements you are Enterprise 1.5 !

Add customer and outside integration and you are 2.0 baby! Ahead of the curve, market leader, and the innovators innovator!

Well that’s how it’s supposed to work. That’s how you create the common treasury.