Social Collaboration: A Retrospective and Outlook

By Oscar Berg (@oscarberg) Jan 17, 2011

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A lot of things happened in the social collaboration space during 2010, several of which have created ripple effects to be seen in 2011 and beyond. This article discusses three stand-out Social Collaboration trends.

The Rise of the Social Intranet

For me, one of the most obvious ways to make an enterprise more responsive, innovative and agile is to integrate and shrink the enterprise by tying the employees, customers and partners closer together. Technology has a key role to play because it helps us overcome the barriers of time and space. However, if we try to do this by implementing new IT solutions that are not integrated and merged with existing solutions, the risk is substantial.

If you look at it this way, social networking and collaboration solutions have to eventually merge with intranet and portal solutions. I agree with Michael Idinopulos from SocialText that the most powerful way to stimulate the adoption of social software is to make it your Intranet, and vice versa. The single most powerful way to make people perceive the intranet as their online workplace is to bring social collaboration to it.

It's interesting to follow leading intranet practitioners such as Jane McConnell and Toby Ward who discuss and elaborate on the concept of the social intranet. Chris McGrath, co-founder of ThoughtFarmer, recently blogged about how the term “social intranet“ only began appearing on the radar in 2010. He proclaims that “social intranets are poised for phenomenal growth in 2011.” Although there might be some bias involved, I think the term is here to stay and that we will develop the concept of social intranet further with more intensity during 2011.

If you would like to know my view, I recommend you to check out my presentation “The Social Intranet” or my blog post “Why traditional intranets fail today’s knowledge workers”.

Technology, Adoption and Culture

As the new generation of (social) collaboration technologies become more common-place, it is natural to start shifting focus from the technologies themselves towards how to improve practices and get return on IT investments. It becomes critical that people adopt the new technologies and start to “re-engineer” their existing behaviors and practices. As a consequence, cultural issues and concerns come more in focus.

People who are categorized as innovators when it comes to adopting new technologies actively explore and try to find uses for them. They are also willing to invest their time and energy into trying to change their own behaviors and practices in order to prove the value of these new technologies. But the majority of people don’t — they hold on to their current behaviors, practices and tools unless there is real proof that changing these will make a significantly positive difference in their daily work and their careers. To change, the results must be worth the effort of changing and they must be sure that results will come.