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Social Business 1.0

By DANIEL ANTION posted 06-21-2011 15:04

  

Last night, I had the pleasure of attending the dinner portion of AIIM New England Chapter’s 16thannual golf tournament, a fundraising event for the Horace Mann School for the Deaf in Boston. AIIM NE has had a 30-year long relationship with the Horace Mann School, and I have to say the dedication of the people in the chapter who serve on the committee runs this event is positively amazing. The spirit of generosity and purpose exhibited by this small group is awe-inspiring! I’m sure the committee doesn’t have the final numbers from this year’s event, but the school principle talked about the fact that over $200,000 has been raised over the 16-year history of the tournament.

Sitting in a room, enjoying a good meal with some old friends and some new acquaintances may seem old-school in today’s Twitter-driven e2.0 world, but I had a great time. I met some people from the chapter who I haven’t had time to connect with during our “normal” events. You know, the ones that end with everyone checking their email on the way to their car. I also met a number of people from the school; faculty, administration, facilities were all covered and even our short conversations revealed their passion and dedication. The best moment for me came during line at the buffet. I was next to a woman whose daughter had graduated from the school and is now in college. She looked at my AIIM NE name badge and said “thank you for helping my daughter!” Kudus to my colleagues who earned those remarks.

Ironically, today is all about a different kind of engagement and interaction. I have been attending sessions and listening to keynotes at the Enterprise 2.0 conference where I will be trying to glean some insight into what might be coming at me in the near future. In a conversation with one of my table mates last night, we talked about how, when our careers began, we were introducing technology to our users. People would see software at work and ask “can I get this for home?” Today, that’s flipped around. In the midst of that pole shift, we’re trying to deploy SharePoint. I’m still not sure where SharePoint fits in all of this, and I’m not sure where I want to position it. There are people to whom I could make points by saying “SharePoint is like Dropbox for the office” and then there are people who would point out Dropbox’s recent failure. Given the periodic rage against Facebook that I hear echoing in the halls, I would never compare SharePoint to that neurotic platform.

On the other hand, if as long as it’s easier to upload files to Dropbox or my Skydrive, or to share pictures on Facebook or Flickr than it is to get behind our firewall and upload content to SharePoint, I’m going to have a battle on my hands. UPS once had an ad campaign that featured the tag line “moving at the speed of business” – I think they were unintentionally correct. Sometimes, business appears to be the lumbering truck crawling along the back roads just as often as it is the 747 moving stuff from China overnight. 



#HoraceMann #AIIMNE #charity #sharepoint #social #SharePoint
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