Do you agree that social tools should be added to HR-specific software rather than integrating the HR software with existing social software?

fredericwilliquet:

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This isn’t a “shock & awe” title to merely draw you in.  This also isn’t a blanket claim from an “expert” who has never been in the trenches that “social business is dead”.   Enterprise 2.0 (aka social business) is not dead. Significant progress continues to be made.  More and more enterprises have social business strategies and efforts for both marketing & internal collaboration. However, enterprises with several years of Enterprise 2.0 efforts under their belt have failed to reach the tipping point and cross into mainstream adoption of social collaboration . Coincidentally, Dion Hinchcliffe recently noted in The Path to Co-Creating a Social Business, the existence of the fissure with older collaborative channels on one side and the option to voluntarily engage socially on the other.   I believe this is a sign post that we must pay attention to and make adjustments or social business could fall deeply into the rabbit hole where knowledge management (KM) efforts of past, already reside.   

A little over a year ago I left my role managing the internal social collaboration efforts for a large global enterprise.  After two and a half years of efforts to evolve how a corporation gets work done, connects employees and communicates, I needed a serious break.  I felt we had reached the maximum adoption we could achieve under the circumstances we were working within.  So I returned back to my roots in social media marketing.  I left the Enterprise 2.0 program not because I lost passion for social collaboration, but because I realized that the effort had plateaued.  The initiative has achieved quite a bit, but my vision & strategy still hasn’t been fully reached. We didn’t cross the chasm – even after almost three years post deployment. Social collaboration is still voluntary and optional.  Based upon discussions around conference “water coolers”, I have discovered that our situation isn’t unique.   I have been doing a lot of reflection to nail down the underlying reason our efforts (collective across the industry) aren’t creating an evolution-yet.  So, here is my stake in the ground on what is the big failure of Enterprise 2.0 social business:

The big failure of social business is a lack of integration of social tools into the collaborative workflow.