Last week, the Lotus Division announced Connections, or Social Computing for companies. This is semi analogous to the My Space, Skype, Flickr and del.icio.us from the open market used by individuals. Here is a discussion of Social Computing in the Enterprise.

I am trying to see the long term view of this. It takes a while for any corporate wide tool or service to be integrated and accepted for day to day use. I included “service” as this is a long term play that will have an intersection with SaaS at IBM, analysts - follow this thread in the future when watching IBM. Back to the point. It is easy to download the social tools, but with easy usually comes limited functionality or single purpose. For example, while you can share your del.icio.us links as many do publicly, the trends across a selected group(s) such as an organization are not trendable. Analysis of trends or the combination of information gathering within a company can help in identifying information and interests. I’ll leave to the better minds of analysts to identify where this is best served like Mike Gotta who discusses tagging in the Enterprise and James Governer on IBM’s enterprise social software rollout.

Inside a company, it will be helpful to quickly find out what is being tracked and by whom. This can either identify an action team or area’s of interest outside of your normal field of vision. In a company, sources of funding can make or break a project, so something as simple as finding who else wants a project is key. Finding the source of information or content expert is a day to day task. Connections make this social task more easily doable than what we have now. How and when the adoption could happen is discussed here in the 5 tips to enterprise 2.0. here.

While we have tools, it is possible to have too much information to choose from, like doing an internal search on a certain technology could turn out hundreds or thousands of hits. How do you filter them as being relevant to what you are doing? Lotus connections can do this inside the firewall and that is the key. There is a lot of information that goes on before something goes public. People don’t see but about a tenth of the effort and work, AND collaboration that went on. This work effort can now be speeded up, discovered faster or implemented in a way we do outside of the firewall, where it has less or no analysis to assist our work efforts.  That is why putting it inside is the key.
So we’ve become familiar with the social networking tools, but now we have the ability to tie them together and empower them in an enterprise. It won’t make the external tools less significant (especially for social situations), rather it will help us do our job better, which at IBM is about the customer.

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 1st, 2007 at 10:51 am and is filed under SaaS, Social Computing, blogging, ibm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.