Social Networking Tools for Enterprises- the way ahead

NO DIFFERENCE

• There is actually no difference between Social Networking Tools for Enterprises and Social Networking Tools for Individuals

• There is only a focus change (and availability of a big budget spend)

Are these the tools? • hypertext and unstructured search tools• wikis• Microblogging• Blogs/Weblogs for storytelling and sharing personal knowledge and experiences• enterprise social bookmarking for tagging and building organizational knowledge• RSS and Activity Streams for signaling• collaborative planning software for peer-based project planning and management• ideas banks for ideation (idea generation)• mashups for visualization• prediction markets for forecasting and identifying risks.• Social Profile for displaying user's Social Graph (Following / Following) and Activity

Stream (micro-blog). Profiles may optionally display user's interests and expertise for expertise search

• Social Search

Main tools (used by individuals)are

• Twitter• Face-book• LinkedIn• U Tube

• Enterprises may use TOOLS to use these tools

Path Ahead

• While many organizations are seeking to ban popular social networking tools (Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, U Tube etc ) from the workplace, others are busy building a case for them.

• There are pros of using social networking tools as part of your enterprise collaboration strategy.

Social...word... developing

• The word "social" draws up a lot of bad vibes in the enterprise community, mainly because of the fear that people will spend too much time socializing and not enough time working.

• But now that things are shifting, and enterprise solutions are being built to look, feel and operate just like Facebook

Path Ahead

• Handled correctly and stuck into a collaboration context, this could translate to an extremely cost-effective means of providing a workgroup solution, especially for groups who are in different organizations, locations etc.

New Ways Required

• Today's hyper-connected global economy requires completely new ways of collaborating and working together.

Directions for future• The purpose of enterprise collaboration on an

"open" network or platform would have to be defined.

• All the external networks to the enterprise would have to be assumed to be accessible with little or no effort, therefore confidential and private data/info would have to be restricted.

• Enterprise collaboration tools have to provide a high enough level of security to be able to exchange data and info with confidence of privacy and data integrity being maintained.

Rakesh Sud sud.rakesh@gmail.com