While agreement around the core concepts of "social software" has remained elusive, the underlying phenomenon is quite real. To date, industry analysts have quite properly focused on the cultural and organizational aspects of social software technologies (blogs, wikis, tag clouds and such) in the enterprise. "The sociology is more important than the technology," you often hear, and I couldn’t agree more.
But the technology still matters, and it turns out that social software tools differ substantially in functionality, maturity, approach and support. Moreover, social software applications have raised concerns in the enterprise: around privacy, security, intellectual property (IP) protection and compliance. IT managers also face more prosaic but equally important considerations of reliability, scalability and sustainability of the software and vendors alike. So let’s look a bit more closely at what constitutes social software.
The social workplace
It seems like nearly all new technologies today get labeled "social." Witness the terms social software, social computing, social networking and so on. Let’s acknowledge first off, though, that work has always been social. Even before the dawn of civilization, hunters and gatherers had to work collectively to find sustenance and shelter.
Nevertheless, the reason social computing has risen to the fore lately is that most modern software—including "enterprise" software of various stripes—has tended to assume that participants were automatons glued to their screens in lonely cubicles. For some mass information processing environments, there might be a kernel of truth to this, but in the real world, we know two things are true:
- People are social animals, even at work (some would say especially at work).
- Knowledge workers are not automatons.
Of course, that varies from job to job, from industry to industry, and from culture to culture. Nevertheless, enterprise systems that fail to support people as social animals typically have poor usability and reduced effectiveness. Moreover, social computing assumes that virtual interaction has value in its own right, separate from any traditional work product.
Meanwhile, notions of "traditional work" are changing as enterprises evolve. You see more virtual teams, more ad hoc projects and greater demand from senior leadership to dissolve internal and external boundaries (frequently the very boundaries those leaders created). Social software constitutes an attempt—many would argue a renewed attempt—to give knowledge workers the facilities they need to successfully work together in that environment.
Vendors have taken notice of the phenomenon and developed dedicated social software applications. They include tools that have existed for some time but have lately reached critical mass—including blogs, wikis and forums—as well as newer functionality like social bookmarking, profiles and public, branded "community" spaces.
Vendors are also "socializing" existing software products. On the main, that is a good thing, but it should not be confused with dedicated social software tools. In the absence of accepted integration standards, adding things like tags, profiles and instant messaging services to longstanding applications can create just another set of siloed communities.
What about Enterprise 2.0?
For better or worse, social software exists within a broader phenomenon that many label Enterprise 2.0 or Web 2.0 for the Enterprise. The notion is that emergent social networking and computing is changing the face of work itself. I think that’s an overstatement, but you don’t have to subscribe to transformative theories to still recognize the value of social software.
Various definitions of Enterprise 2.0 also take into account newer alternatives to traditional approaches in the software marketplace, including:
- rich Internet applications in general, and AJAX in particular, as a user interface alternative to clunky browser screens and disconnected desktop applications;
- software-as-a-service (SaaS) business and delivery models, as an alternative to traditional, on-premise, "installed" software; and
- mashups, as a simpler way to integrate Web-based applications and data in lieu of more complicated and expensive lower-level development.
They are all welcome developments, but none of those approaches is intrinsically essential to social software success. Similarly, those new approaches will have a substantial impact in technology spaces well beyond social software. Nonetheless, you will see vendors frequently tout those dimensions of their offering to grant themselves Web 2.0 or Enterprise 2.0 credentials. Tread warily there.
What is social software?
CMS Watch defines social software as: tools for collaboration and networking within and beyond the enterprise.
There is a tension between the notions of collaboration and networking, although both are critical to long-term success. Networking revolves more around individuals and conversations; collaboration tends to center on teams and tasks. Clearly, the boundaries are blurry, and most professionals, most of the time, would like to network and collaborate with colleagues in the same system at the same time. Yet most tools in the marketplace don’t work that way.
Many observers label collaboration as "old school," while networking is considered newer, cooler and more "fun." There’s some truth to that: Networking on Facebook is more fun than sharing documents in SharePoint.
It turns out, however, that most professionals want to do more than network with peers. To varying degrees, they want to contribute and consume information collaboratively as well. Oftentimes a discussion will ripen into a project, which may require a different set of supporting technologies. But that in turn doesn’t mean that project participants suddenly want to stop discussing and brainstorming. In other words, networking begets collaboration, and vice versa.
As a practical matter, social software tools range across a panoply of different technology families, including portals and collaboration suites, pure-play blog/wiki/forum products, hosted community solutions and revamped Web 2.0 modules from major software vendors.
Functionally, social computing can span a variety of practical business services. Some products, like standalone blog and wiki tools, may emphasize one or two business services, while other "suites" may–-for better or worse—incorporate numerous business services in a single environment. Typical business services include: blog, wiki, social ranking, project tracking and participation, multimedia, information filtering, file sharing, discussion, presence/instant messaging, people finding and Web conferencing.
Those business services overlap somewhat, abut still fulfill different purposes. Note the difference among:
- sharing a file with departmental colleagues,
- editing an entry in the company’s product support wiki, and
- discussing a new idea with co-workers around the world in an online forum.
It seems increasingly clear that participants would rather not have to learn different tools to accomplish those various tasks. But it is equally clear that no single vendor in the marketplace excels at all or even most of those services. In fact, many successful social software case studies revolve around the dedicated application of a standalone tool.
In other words, the same suite vs. best-of-breed debate that characterizes many other technology spaces is alive and well on the social software landscape as well (see sidebar below-The social software marketplace). The best way to sort out your needs, however, is to avoid calls of "Let’s install a wiki," or "Our staff should be blogging," or "We need an online forum." As with any other software implementation, you have to ask what you’re really trying to accomplish.
Different scenarios
The good news is, you are not alone figuring that out. Enterprises around the world are experimenting with social computing, and various common-use cases–-we’ll call them "scenarios"-–are emerging. In CMS Watch’s vendor evaluation research, we’ve identified 11 common social software scenarios. Overall, those scenarios represent different business objectives or outcomes that can yield real business benefits. In some cases, they may represent specific projects as well, although we find that many social software implementations target multiple scenarios.
To be sure, the scenarios are abstractions. In practice, your own efforts are likely to represent variants or some hybrid combination of scenarios. And the cases overlap somewhat. Nonetheless, they are useful for understanding which types of products tend to work better for which type of projects.
We break the 11 scenarios down into two broad categories—external and internal:
- External scenarios involve social networking and collaboration with people primarily outside your firewall.
- Internal scenarios focus on activity that takes place primarily behind your enterprise firewall. We say "primarily" because in practice enterprise networks can get fungible, especially where collaboration is involved.
Internal scenarios include: project collaboration, enterprise collaboration, enterprise discussion, information organization and filtering, knowledgebase management, communities of practice and enterprise networking.
External scenarios include: branded customer communities, customer/reader interaction, partner collaboration and professional networking.
Among other benefits, scenario analysis can help with product selection. Explicitly or not, different social software products target different use cases. Understanding the business scenarios that fit better or worse for the different packages enables you to dispense with horse-race-style evaluations (e.g., "What’s the best wiki?"—as if such a thing could exist) and helps you peer deeper into their relative strengths and weaknesses for your particular circumstances.
For example, we find that most technology offerings in this space target either internal or external scenarios. Or, if the same product is used for both, typically it is implemented as two wholly separate environments. Similarly, some wiki tools facilitate the kind of structured information management required for building and maintaining formal knowledgebases, while others are better suited for the unfettered flow of information exchange typically found in a community of practice.
So, while social software is relatively new, the key to success is as old as the first line of application code ever written: Know what you’re trying to accomplish before you invest in the technology.
In the face of the difficult cultural and organizational challenges that social software implementations can raise, you don’t want to over-expend resources on tools when you really need to focus on managing change.
At the same time, it does truly matter which technologies you deploy and which vendors you select as partners. Social software may engender a kind of healthy informality of communication and information exchange, but enterprises looking for long-term success should take a very methodical approach to selecting the right tools.
The social software marketplace
The social software marketplace is highly fragmented and likely to remain so for some time. Here is an incomplete but representative list of the major players.
Platform vendors
These are behemoth software vendors who arrived belatedly but with some force to the social software landscape. With the exception of Google, they are also among the pricier offerings.
Social software suites
These are smaller, privately held vendors that offer an array of different social software services, but, individually, they come to this space with a particular background in one application or another, which typically remains their core strength and orientation.
Wiki software
These are standalone wiki software packages. Nearly all the other vendors in the tiers already mentioned offer some sort of wiki services, but they generally pale in comparison to what you would find in these dedicated wiki tools.
Blog software
Although all these vendors have ambitions about expanding to become more full-fledged Web content management and social software offerings, the core of each of these platforms is its blogging service.
White-label community services
These are hosted suites of social software services that an enterprise can private-label to create their own branded, public offerings.
Public networks
These are public networking sites catering to individuals, but with the opportunity to create groups and networks that can be leveraged within and beyond the enterprise.