**Building the social enterprise**

Why do so few companies capture the full value of social technologies? There’s no doubt organizations have begun to realize significant value from largely external uses of social. 1 1. Roxane Divol, David Edelman, and Hugo Sarrazin, “ Demystifying social media ,” McKinsey Quarterly , April 2012. Yet internal […]

Tasks and collaboration: let’s get to the point

It’s not surprising, really, that we’ve reached this point; despite all the advantages that a more social, open approach to enabling collaboration brings, the reality is that, when it comes down to it, we don’t just collaborate for the sake of collaborating, we do so in the context of what we are trying to get done, as part and parcel of the tasks we are carrying out. One of the key things that differentiates the use of social technologies in a business context from public, consumer social networking services is that there is a purpose to using these tools – we have a job, a role, and everything we do at work is centred around that. We don’t use these tools in the same, open-ended way at work that we might do in a personal setting – where there is interest and value in simply browsing through information other people have posted for hours at a time – we are typically looking for something specific, be that the answer to a problem we are trying to solve, the person who can provide the skills to solve our problem, or simply feedback on what we are doing.

Angela Ashenden As we enter a phase where social collaboration is beginning to mature as a concept, and is being increasingly accepted by businesses as a way to help make positive changes to the way they work and the culture they aspire to develop, one of the most fascinating […]