If you want to understand just how social technologies will increase in their pervasiveness across the modern workplace, then you should read Lee Bryant’s post on social layering today. Lee works for Headshift, a consultancy in the Dachis Group focused on social business design.
The idea behind the social layer is simple: Just like any piece of technology, social software should be a layer in your enterprise architecture that surfaces the events of a company’s systems of record — and enable employees to collaborate and take action on information (be it human or machine generated) in real-time. It was the premise behind the launch of Socialtext Connect, our offering that lets companies build their own social layer.
Here’s one excerpt from Lee’s post I especially liked:
At the base of the enterprise IT stack, we have expensive, slow-moving technology such as document management systems, ERP systems, databases and so on, which we might change every 3-5 years, if at all. They are good at the heavy lifting and underlying processes that many businesses need, but often very poor at user experience. Assuming these systems expose APIs and data sharing, which most these days do, we can layer on a slightly lighter, slightly faster moving layer of social sharing capabilities such as social networking, collaboration, micro-blogging, wiki engines, etc.
What Lee describes here as the social layer represents a far different approach than tacking social features onto each of those traditional systems of record and the select employees who have access to them, which would further reinforce the idea of walling employees off from people and information across their company that could help them do their jobs better.
Just as importantly, Lee’s post appeals to those of us who want to see better alignment between line of business and IT concerning the implementation, adoption and achievable business value of social software.
If IT departments can continue to own and manage underlying enterprise IT platforms, but expose APIs and data, then business users can define, provision and run their own social applications at the top of the stack without having to defer to IT for every decision they make, or work at a slower pace and in a more constrained way than they need. Based on our experience of the difficulties of implementing social business tools within existing IT department frameworks and culture, this would be a huge win for all concerned, and where we are using this approach, we find it solves a lot of issues and concerns on both sides.
Line of business of people are critical to the success of social software because they can identify specific pain points that can be remedied by social technologies. IT plays a critical role around areas of security, compliance and architecture, and you must work with them to make social a layer, not just a feature in the enterprise architecture.
On Wednesday, our lead developer Luke Closs will be leading a webinar that will detail the inner-workings of Socialtext Connect. We hope to see as many of you there as possible.