Topic Series: The Social Enterprise
January - March 2014

Technologies to support online social interactions are well established, and users across all demographics are increasingly comfortable with their usage.

Yet many organisations struggle to bring the connections, collaboration, efficiency and engagement offered by social tools into their environments. Why this disconnect between potential and reality?

The Topic Series: The Social Enterprise explores success stories as well as challenge points for making organisations socially adept. We take into account technology, tools, enterprise opportunities and barriers around making organisations more social.

Among the specific issues under consideration:

• Users want to be more social, but policies/tools don't let them
  
• Users aren't willing to be more social, even when the tools are available
  
• The wrong people (or at least incomplete project teams) are in charge of implementing social tools
  
• Social tools tend to get implemented tactically rather than strategically and may lack a centralised vision for what the organisation is trying to accomplish
  
• A single organisation might have 5 or more different tools, none of which "play well together"
  
• Start up, disruptive developers come up with engaging and intriguing tools, which don't fit well within an enterprise environment.

At the same time, everyone suspects that it should be easier than it is to make the most of the cultural change towards social knowledge sharing in today's workplace.

Series Producer
Shimrit Janes

Series Producer
James Mullan