Recently, Dennis Howlett tracked down Oliver Marks of Constellation Research for a Skype video session on the merits and pitfalls of social software. During the 13 minute discussion, Marks explains why “social” is near-useless without business context and warns of the dangers of “collaboration silos.”
Show notes
0:00 Why deriving business benefit from social software is no easy feat, and the perils of “social silos”.
1:50 Oliver’s advice to customers and why you don’t always need to collaborate.
3:55 Pros and cons of “vendor-neutral solutions” (Tempo, Tibbr), and why these new solutions will need to prove themselves at scale.
5:55 The proliferation of social solutions – the shakeout has begun. Common language of business rules = in. Buzzwords = out.
7:35 Dennis presses Oliver on timeframes for adoption. Key trend: mobile (executives on tablets, traveling workers). Problem: challenge of intellectual property protection (businesses don’t want a “Facebook-like” approach to sharing information). Email isn’t going away either.
10:34 Oliver’s book recommendations: Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done and The Other Side of Innovation: Solving the Execution Challenge.
11:30 There is continued consulting demand to help companies sort out the sensible collaboration approaches from the empty ones.
Here is the downloadable audio version
Here is the line audio version:
[...] What typically happens here is a social network for their silo, or a collaboration silo as I was calling this a couple of years ago. Multiples of these can have unintended [...]
[...] What typically happens here is a social network for their silo, or a collaboration silo as I was calling this a couple of years ago. Multiples of these can have unintended consequences.Despite the signal to noise ratio, there is a [...]
No sound from the person you’re interviewing.
Ray