Social Collaboration In the Enterprise: The Heart--And Goal---of Community Is "Collaborating People", Not Collaboration Tools

Community and collaboration in business enterprises is about people working together more effectively, quickly, and proactively – to achieve the goals of the business as robustly as possible. This may sound like a simplistic statement, but it seems to be eluding many companies that are adopting social media tools.

There is a constant stream of information on the internet on how to implement social collaboration software in enterprises, both for internal and external purposes. Quite a healthy industry of solutions, consultants and advisors has sprung into being. Many blog posts and articles are devoted to recommending the best ways to take advantage of social media software.

But for many companies, implementation efforts for social collaboration software will be doomed to failure for one simple reason: most enterprises have failed to engender a "collaboration culture" based on real human interaction. The executive management of many companies does not even understand what a "collaboration culture" is.

Frankly, executive management of many companies is hard put to authentically value employees--these companies want to de-humanize employees with such terms as "resources" and "human capital", and think that it is enough if they sling around a few "mission statements" claiming that they "value" employees.