3. Social embedding - Going to where the work is, social embedding allows us to put sharing, social notifications, and threaded conversations inside existing systems of record. Embedding is a technology that has long been proven on the Web and is similar to what the Facebook Like button has achieved, near ubiquity through simplicity. Many social tools use this technique today, but it must be internalized as an enterprise capability.

4. Social integration - When wrapping enterprise software and placing it inside our social business platforms or embedding specific social experiences in our enterprise systems don't cut it, the fall back option is traditional integration. This will often be more expensive and time-consuming but can be used when the first two won't work for a given reason.The first two approaches are far more desirable and now widely supported by standardized social technologies that have surfaced in the last year. Applying them can greatly reduce the distance between our business systems and social systems. The challenge is in connecting our business thinking with our social business service delivery.<br />The whole premise of efforts like OpenSocial is that social business activities should not be isolated from the work going on in other applications.<br />Why Is Social Important To Your Organization?<br />Businesses have found themselves trying to rapidly adjust to the market demands. Some of those businesses have found, however, that they are not agile enough and can't adapt as fast as they would like to respond to emerging opportunities. It's time to take action and position your organization for growth as the global economy slowly comes out of its downturn.<br />The following sub-sections describe steps to take to position your company for growth.<br />STEP 1: ACCELERATE INNOVATION - INCREASE PRODUCTIVITY<br />In order to position your organization for growth, we need to understand what are they key areas to focus on. An imperative way to drive growth is to accelerate innovation and ensure that you innovate faster than your competitors. Apple is a great example of this. They've seen huge success in the last 3 years because they've innovated a lot faster than their biggest competitor: Microsoft. While Apple still has a lot of work to do to catch up on market share, their revenue and profit numbers are certainly impressive. Apple has also been able to surpass Microsoft and has become the biggest technology company based on market capitalization.<br />Several surveys result that more than 90% of the CEOs need to restructure the way their organizations work. 5.3 hours are wasted per employee per week due to inefficient processes. Additionally, two hours are spent per employee per day looking for the right information and expertise within an organization.<br />Often times, information within an enterprise lives in silos. Therefore, the usefulness of this information is not maximized across the organization. Many companies have deployed team sites in the hopes that employees would dump their wisdom in these sites. However, each part of the organization, down to the department level, uses different places for document storage. This leads to fragmentation of the corporation as a whole and it means that employees must do a lot more work to individually search across these information silos. Inevitably, this leads to employee frustration and because they can't find the information they need, they need to quot;
re-invent the wheelquot;
and recreate the intellectual capital, which already exists.<br />This is the where social software for the enterprise first comes in. Social software inside the enterprise helps accelerate innovation and increase productivity. <br />STEP 2: RAPIDLY DEVELOP WORKFORCE SKILLS AND CAPABILITIES<br />The major challenges faced by organizations that could prevent growth. One of them is ensuring that the right employees with the right skills are allocated to the right projects. In fact, organizations classified as financial outperformers are 47% more likely to rate themselves as effective in workforce allocation.<br />There are three critical capabilities that need to be provided: developing future leaders, rapidly developing workforce skills and capabilities, and fostering knowledge sharing and collaboration. There are various reasons why they are not able to address:<br />Embedding creativity, agility, and speed, however, won't be easy. A number of boundaries -- functional, cultural, geographical, generational, and informational -- constrain workforce productivity and prevent enterprises from realizing their full potential. Organizations must overcome these borders to address emerging opportunities, whenever, wherever, and however they arise.<br />At the employee level, it's often left up to the employee to do self-training or figure out which courses to take. Companies also struggle to both find and nurture effective future leaders. <br />Social software behind the firewall is the right solution in this case. Whether users decide to blog, write wikis, share files, participate in discussion forums, join/participate in communities, their intellectual capital is captured in one single place: their profile. This profile is fully searchable and discoverable making it easier to identify individuals for the right job. At the same time, employees can effectively learn from each other and discover topics that they may be interested in and even career opportunities that best match their interests, skills, and capabilities. This informal learning (also called social learning in the enterprise) is critical to empower employees to rapidly develop the skills they need for the job they want.<br />STEP 3: BREAK DOWN EXISTING Problems (Silos)<br />For some time now, organizations may have been following knowledge management principles where everything is tightly controlled and centered on documents. Individual business units, departments or divisions may have chosen their own way of collaborating around documents. This often means different technology products sitting disconnected from the rest of the enterprise, and perhaps not even accessible by everyone in the enterprise.<br />Organizations need to develop the infrastructure and, perhaps most importantly, culture required to stimulate innovation and enhance operation efficiency and effectiveness. The 2010 Global Chief Human Resource Officer (CHRO) Study clearly concludes that the best way to achieve this is by encouraging the formation and use of cross-organization communities around strategic business topics, solicit and recognize fresh insights and new thinking from internal and external sources, and create value through the systematic capture and reuse of individual work outcomes.<br />Cultural and organizational silos often compromise the ability of companies to share information across functional boundaries. A senior vice president of HR of a North American company said: quot;
We need to know our stuff and be self-reliant, to solve problems cross-functionally and to fully leverage our talent and ideasquot;
.<br />An enterprise-wide social collaboration platform can easily break down organizational and collaboration silos and unite your workforce. It can give your workforce the tools necessary to form and track communities of practices, share and re-use intellectual capital, and lead idea capture. Additionally, it can even break down the barriers between employees and customers. <br />You can't expect to build a Social Business solution and pray to the gods that employees will use it. It just won't work. As stated above, Social Business aims to break down silos, connect employees, and increase productivity and this is only achieved if the employees believe and use the system. Social Business is about leveraging the wisdom of the crowds. Social Business is about leveraging each other's work and ideas. Without people, the system breaks down.<br />Questions to think about:<br />What can I do to engage users on day 1?<br />What can I do to keep users engaged?<br />How can I increase trust in the system?<br />What is the Importance of Social Everywhere?<br />Today's workers are under extreme pressure to meet deadlines. It's unreasonable to expect that they'll have to take the time to learn new tools and figure out ways to incorporate it into their business process. Therefore, it's essential that these new collaboration technologies be weaved into existing business processes. If employees can collaborate from their existing tools without needing to open a browser, sign on, and consume/share content separately then it's more likely that the employees will participate more and rely on it. You want to drive your employees to social software, not away from it.<br />