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What about socializing business information instead of people ?

By Bertrand Duperrin posted 07-10-2010 09:16

  

When employees have to tell why they don't adopt enterprise 2.0 as easily as expected, one of the most common explaination is : "too many tools, too much information, we focus on what's core to our work, email and traditional enterprise software". This often sounds surprising since, in fact, the purpose of social software is to make their work easier by providing better access to the knowledge and people they need to be more efficient at solving problems. Seen from an user standpoint it's easier to understand. The world is divided in two : business information and social information. By definition if one is about business the other is about...something undefined that may possibly be about business but that's not 100% sure. Categorizing information according to the tool it comes from is having a tool centric approach that mislead users who are lead to evaluate the relevance of information according the the tool that contains it and not to its intrinsic value in context. Adopting a user centric approach makes things look quite different : - any information is business information. If not it has nothing to do in their information landscape (or, at least, should not bother them and grab their attention if they don't request it). - any information is social by nature because it may need to be shared or be the starting point of an interaction. Social experiences don't happen unless there's a business problem that needs to be solved. Fortunately, things are getting better. We're hearing more and more about things about "social as layer and not as a feature". This will lead to the emergence of a third kind of information that can be called "socialized business information" and defined as socially enriched business information and perfectly matches users expectations : - the ability to start a social experience around any information to solve a business problem - the ability to grab the worth of the past social experiences that happened around a given information. Businesses and people need to socialize information and they often don't understand why some want them to socialize themselves through tools that is not seen as a solution but as a new problem (who said burden ?) at first sight. In fact the hardest thing in enterprise 2.0 adoption is less about making people adopt more social behaviors in a business contact than about making them use social software. Bringing social capabilities into the whole information landscape and make social social software a kind of invisible layer looks like a relevant way to make users understand that it's all about providing them with more efficient tools to make the most of information to do their work and not about making them split them use one more (even great) tool. Instead of banning external services, businesses should have a look and understand what the Facebook "Like" button means, how people are using, for instance, Diigo to annotate and start conversations on any web page while transparently consolidating everything on the Diigo platform. That's only a beginning but it may be quite inspiring.



#enterprise2.0 #information #socializedbusinessinformation #Adoption #sociallayer
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