I think of tweeter as a tool that adds to the collaboration system. When I see it as an independent solution I find difficult to understand it’s purpose.

I believe the purpose is not a technological issue, it is a processes issue. Therefore no functionality would make the work if the process is not defined considering the social factor that plays within the organization.

What if you implement a wonderful dashboard with accurate info, and no body else uses it? It is not only a training problem, ,it is more a lack of understanding of what is good for each one of the team members. Might be that a dashboard will make one guy to work more and for instance productivity can be affected negatively.

Enterprise Social Networking is a good thing, but I still feel like Governance and effective measurement/integration into business processes has a long way to go when it comes to Social. I loved an analogy I think Ben Curry once used: It’s like putting the toothpaste back in the tube – Once you let it loose you had best be ready to adequately support it.

Thoughts?

Over the past 18 months, I have been an avid user of Twitter as a collaboration tool. Some days, I find an invaluable nugget, and other days I wonder if the tool has a purpose. On those days, I think of Twitter as “collaboration without a purpose”, and am reminded of a recent article remarking that >90% tweets are ignored.

Now, I’ll take a different perspective. Imagine SharePoint as a platform for content-centric business application. Here is an environment ripe for “collaboration with a purpose”. People want to share content, information, status, direction, and news. The content in SharePoint may only communicate part of the story, but when coupled with social technologies, valuable context may be added to the content. Or consider instances where content is coupled with workflow, where business is in motion around SharePoint content — social technologies can provide real-time context, alerts, status, or directions that make the business operate more efficiently.

I will offer an example: what if I have 10 pieces of content or work items available for me to review on a SharePoint site. It would be awesome to have a kind of social dashboard or social web part that showed me a priority (e.g., my boss says work on item #3 first), a status (e.g., Bob says he is now working on item #5 and expects to be finished by 4pm today), or alert (e.g., customer service reps had a call from Client A, and processing item #2 is now a high priority). The ability to receive, view, and offer instant updates can make work much more efficient.

This is where I see collaboration meeting Enterprise Social Networking — in the business application arena — and I am all for more of it being made available to end-users.