Social Communications… anybody ??

More and more vendors are coming up with Social Tools for enterprises. I was reading a blog by Blair Pleasant titled "IBM Integrates Unified Communications with Social Software" at ucstrategies.com. IBM's social offerings for the enterprise - Quickr and Connections are reportedly bringing benefits to companies adopting them. But still the thought lingers on how employees will be able to adjust to using these tools and ones similar from other vendors? How will employees be able to keep away from email and instead collaborate online instantaneously? How will the older generation in the organization adapt to these new social tools?

The new look and feel of the social tool interface that employees will be expected to use would be far more "busy" and cluttered. In fact the first few days, weeks, or maybe months of introduction of social tools, in the endeavor to make enterprises herald enterprise 2.0 concepts, might turn out to be quite chaotic… promising to settle down into a more pleasant experience full of benefits. I tried using Google wave, briefly though, and like everybody else was impressed with the features at play. Simultaneous editing, recording of the collaboration session to be played later, voting options, were some of the features that registered in mind when I experimented with the waves. Of course, the fact that the offering is browser based is a big plus that goes in tow with the basic tenets of social tool offerings. That given, nothing prevented me from using the Google wave further… but I haven't since then!! Well the reason could be downright lethargy, in the extreme, or maybe I couldn't connect with how it is going to help me at work or otherwise. The point I am trying to make is that all of these are great offerings from committed vendors, we in the enterprises need to figure out ahead of time as to how our employees are going to use it. The use cases pertaining to typical way of functioning of individuals in the company need to be documented and communicated. We cannot take for granted that the employees will be able to figure out themselves and things will fall in place. In order to derive ROI and benefit for the organization, it is crucial that there is a uniform non-chaotic approach that is well documented and shared. The other part is that one needs to be online for most part in order to be able to work in a socially (em)powered enterprise. But there is a lot of work that still needs to get done offline!! - while at home, while commuting in bus or a private chauffeur driven car, or even when on vacation when you have nothing else to do.

What is the role of UC (unified communications) in social applications? Is UC fundamental while social tools are plugged in? Or is it that the Social Application is the primary interface aided by communication plugins (for making calls or sending messages)? I would probably think it is the latter and that would prevail. While surfing on this topic in search of use cases with a punch, I have found to my dismay that I am yet to come across any that qualify. There are use cases of course but most of them are dealing with "finding the expert to answer queries in a contact center", "finding the right expert to review in a large organization" kind of scenario which somehow do not appeal to the desired extent. They do not demonstrate the inevitability of adopting Social-UC. Well, as Blair Pleasant mentioned in her blog, people will probably use social applications to figure out whom to collaborate with and then go ahead and use any enterprise UC and collaboration software that their company recommends. That sort of sums up where Social Software and UC stand… but are the lines drawn between them?? I don't think so…

About the Author

Narasinga Rao has a Bachelor?s degree in Electronics for BMS College of Engineering. He has a total of about 23 years of domain experience in telecom. He has been associated with Wipro for about 15 years. Earlier he was associated with Bharath Electronics for about 8 years in designing telecom switches for the Indian army.

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