Emerging Social Software Technology

“Enterprise 2.0 is an important concept… It represents the most important and potentially disruptive business challenge since the advent of modern management” says Jerry Bowles.

“For better or worse, Enterprise 2.0 has become the buzzword, or neologism, if you insist, to describe the convergence or collision of a new breed of widely available and deployed participative social networking technologies (those things we call Web 2.0) with traditional hierarchical organizational dynamics. No one yet knows exactly what this will produce in the long run or even if it’s a good or bad thing. It is, however, an incredibly BIG thing and one with enormous implications in the world of business which is one of key building blocks of civilizaton.”

Powerful words but in essence containing an important message for NOBO. Social software has the potential to be disruptive and provide the environment to enable core NOBO competencies such as dialogue, learning, creativity and innovation.

Which technologies are these? With reference to Gartner Highlights of Key Emerging Technologies in 2005 and 2006 the following technologies can be regarded as significant in truly empowering the twenty-first century workforce.

Wikis are great for group brainstorming and collaborative projects. Ideas can be collected and developed by a using the simple, web-based collaborative system. Users are able to change web pages created by other users.

Blogging involves the use of online personal journals by knowledge workers either individually or in a group, to further organisational goals.

Peer to Peer (P2P) voice over IP (VoIP) Telephony services like Skype currently enjoy significant consumer adoption and are beginning to make inroads into the business landscape.

Podcasting offers a way to ‘subscribe’ to radio programmes and have then delivered to your PC.

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is a simple data format that enables web sites to inform subscribers of new content and distribute content more efficiently by bypassing the browser via RSS reader software.

Collective Intelligence An approach to producing intellectual content that results from individuals working together with no centralized authority.

Social Network Analysis (SNA) SNA is the use of information and knowledge from many people and their personal networks.

The social software technologies I have described in this blog will feature heavily in business landscapes of the future but before they do, organisations are going to have to foster strategies to adopt these technologies…