In his blog post The Best is Yet to Come in Social Media, Esteban Kolsky presents the hype cycle for social technologies and combines this with the adoption cycle of the same technologies. The picture indicates that the adoption of social media is in the 20-30% range. 

"Knowing about it and knowing how to use it for business are different things (heck, even knowing you CAN use it for business are different things).  While there is a tad more than 10% of the world on Facebook, the volume of traffic in there that is used for business is below 1% (cannot find the actual stat, but it was well below 1% last time I saw the report about two months ago — even if it tripled in usage, still below 2% and still quite insignificant).  Twitter is different, but also — the volume of tweet used for business is minimal.  In addition, the number of businesses using it for business is very small, but heavily biased in favor of mega-large-humongous organizations which tend to bias our perception when we see it in the news."

"The benchmark for success is how many others are depending on your ecosystem for their own success."

Read the article and blog at http://ornot.ca/2011/03/07/the-long-tail-of-search

Sumeet Moghe writes about our yearning for information structure in surroundings like the corporate intranet. At the same time we exhibit a totally contrary behaviour in our search for information outside the firewall, where no one assume a single hierarchy would be a sensible method of navigation. The Yahoo directory worked back in the days - way back. Today we are happy to google our way towards the information we need, which is why the metadata driven world of content filters instead of content hierarchies should be the design paradigm for any internal corporate information repositories and collaboration tools.

Read the full article on Preparing For Serendipity.

Ramon Padilla analyses a great post by Ross Mayfield in his article "Are your business processes and e-mail the same thing?":

I was reading the July issue of CIO magazine when I came across a quote from Ross Mayfield, the president and cofounder of Socialtext, which produces enterprise wikis. The quote from him reads, “(Employees) spend most of their time handling exceptions to business processes. That’s what they are doing in their inbox for four hours a day. E-mail has become the great exception handler.”

He lists five possible reasons for why email has become the alternative for fixing a broken business process:

1. Making it up as we go along. As I said above, e-mail becomes particularly handy when you are making your business processes up as you go along, and you end up managing your workflow and exceptions through e-mail.
2. Not enforcing business processes. The organization has well defined processes but doesn’t enforce them; therefore, people choose to do what they are comfortable with — which is send an e-mail. No matter that what they should have been doing is filling out a form (electronically) and having it routed automatically within a system to be handled appropriately.
3. Business processes that are not automated or automated with software that is outdated or doesn’t fulfill the user’s needs. Lacking automation, people will turn to what they have available in order to get their work done. If a business process has no automation, e-mail becomes a de facto substitute. Imagine a permitting operation that has no automation. A person comes in the door, requests a permit, fills out a form, provides necessary documentation, and then waits for approval. In lieu of a dedicated permitting system, creative staff come up with the following: Person comes in the door, fills out the form and provides necessary documentation. Staff scans the forms and documents into images and attaches them to an email to the next person in the process, who then handles and moves the process on. I could go on, but you can quickly see that while the above solution “works” to a degree, the e-mail system suddenly has turned into a document management system, a database, and a file management system.
4. Lack of communications within an application or integration with other communication mechanisms. I have always been a big believer that if you create an application to suit a purpose such as a permitting system, that you try to keep the users inside the application to the greatest extent possible. Ideally, that means that all messages and communications regarding the business process originate, transmit, and store within the application. Thus in my example, all information regarding permits is found in one place — the permitting system.
5. Lack of communication alternative besides e-mail. Some processes aren’t amenable to an application because they are more free form, yet need some kind of structure. This is where wikis, intranets, mashups, instant messaging, and other Web 2.0 applications become necessary. Without them, e-mail becomes the repository for any and all information.

Read the full post here: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/tech-manager/?p=576

It really takes a village, or more properly, an forward-looking organization that is trying to recalibrate itself around the way that the way that the world seems to be shifting. That shift, the fast-moving and global world of sharing, participating, and openness that is social media at its finest, is one in which smart organizations will pull together their best internal leaders to proactively make themselves better.

More from Dion Hinchcliffe at http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe/who-should-be-in-charge-of-enterprise-20/1434?tag=mantle_skin;content

Oscar Berg writes about the business case for social intranets in his blog The Content Economy. The long tail phenomena of endless information supply from within the enterprise is driven by our change of preference in communication tools.

As a result of these changes, more and more of the conversations where we exchange information and knowledge with each other are taking place online instead of face-to-face or via telephony. Content is produced as a bi-product of our conversations. With virtual collaboration becoming the norm even when we meet face-to-face or just need to talk to each other, the things we say and do are being captured and encoded into various forms of content such as voice, video, photos and text. The dark matter of the business universe  is becoming visible and accessible as our business conversations are being captured instead of being transient and passing by without a notice, only touching a those individuals who participated in a specific conversation. In short, the cost of communicating has collapsed.

What is interesting is how the information and knowledge exchanged through these various kinds of conversations now is easily captured and can be made available to people who did not participate in the conversation. Content is increasingly being created as a bi-product of conversations. This is to be contrasted with the typical approach where we capture and encode the information into content (documents etc) before it is communicated.

With this change, the linear publishing model of old intranets must naturally also change to accomodate the new form in which internal corporate information and knowledge is encapsulated. An intranet for the "prosumer":

Even though it may seem like the free flowing conversations and comments are not "work activity" as we knew it in the 20th century, there are strong reasons why corporations today must be interested in capturing and facilitating this new information flow:

If innovation, like Idris Motee says, “is like ping-pong", it is because ideas need to be bounced back and forth before they mature and can attract the right people who can bring it to the market. If an organization really considers innovation to be important, it should engage everyone and make innovation everybody's business. It should provide a ping-pong table, give every coworker, partner and customer a racket to play with, and invite them to play.

The final quote from an IDC whitepaper from 2001 called "The High Cost Of Not Finding Information" summarizes the business case of going beyond traditional intranets:

While the costs of not finding information are enormous, they are hidden within the enterprise, and therefore they are rarely perceived as having an impact on the bottom line. Decisions are usually information problems. If they are made with poor or erroneous information, then they put the life of the enterprise at stake. Therefore, it behooves the enterprise to provide the best information-finding tools available and to ensure that all of its intellectual assets have access to them, no matter where they reside.

John H Ayre describes the EA Big Picture with the following... picture that lists, err... the nine different big pictures that Enterprise Architecture should consist of:

In my opinion the best insight can be found in the discussion on where to start building the big picture:

But that is a lot of pictures to consider, and we have to start somewhere. The majority of “traditional” organisations start in the centre by developing the Solution model. This task often falls to IT alone, acting on a variety of unaligned instructions from many interested parties. In my opinion, this is where many of the problems associated with “Big IT” originate.

It is far better to treat the EA Grid as a jigsaw. Start with the corners, then fill in the edges, and finally complete the centre. The corners allow us to better understand how the edges fit, and the edges give us a better understanding of how the middle needs to look. However, as for a jigsaw, if you find a piece that you know fits an area you are not yet working on, don’t just ignore it; put it where you think it belongs.

It is also best to start with the top left corner (the Services model) in keeping with the service oriented approaches that many architects adopt, and then work left to right and top to bottom (still focusing on the corners first and foremost).

Read more in The Enterprising Architect blog.

Paul adams has compiled a very interesting slide deck about The Real Life Social Network in which he introduces a concept called "temporary ties".

Strong and weak ties are not enough when we think of relationships online. We need a new category of tie, and I call it the temporary tie. Temporary ties are people that you have no recognized relationship with, but that you temporarily interact with. 

Once the task has been completed, temporary ties are unlikely to interact again. You don't know these people beyond the one conversation you had, or the words they typed and whatever online profile they have. Your interaction with them is temporary. With the rise of user generated content online, temporary ties are becoming more important.

Read more from Paul's blog Thinking Outside In.

Julien from Superfeedr on why publishing content should be in everyone's interest:

The non realtime publishers

This is the last category of site, and still the vast majority. When looking at Alexa’s top 50, it’s obvious. Yahoo!, Windows Live, Baidu, Wikipedia, Amazon, Ebay, LinkedIn, Flickr, Craigslist, RapidShare…

Where are the e-commerce website sharing their catalogs in realtime with the price comparison search engines?

Where are the classifieds website pushing their content in realtime to iPhones?

Where are the Sports site pushing their content in realtime to forums or chat services?

Where are the news outlets pushing data to the feed readers?

One could argue that pushing data is letting 3rd party application use it. That’s my point actually : pushing data away is at worse pushing it to services with users, which means that your content will eventually gain eyeballs. At best, nobody cares about your content, so you’re safe.

Of course, we talked about the hundreds of new usages that are yet to be seen, from sync, to mobile, from presence to notifications… we haven’t seen anything yet. Please, publishers, let others benefit from your data. Publishing your awesome content without distributing it is pretty much like making the best product in the world but leaving it in the factory.

It’s time for content publishers to make their content dynamic and push it so they can control its distribution.