The Post-2.0 Era: Social in the Context of My Work

The widespread adoption of Facebook, the embrace of activity streams by business applications, and the success of smartphone applications have significantly changed information worker expectations since Enterprise 2.0 was introduced in 2006. Post-2.0 technologies are enabling the Social Online Workplace, a worker-centric yet social environment facilitating ongoing discussions that are seeded by messages coming from individuals, business applications, and collaborative tools.

This is an opportunity for the IT organization to get out in front of this change and start planning how to provide social infrastructure within an enterprise architecture. While the initial application of these new architectural components should be on improving worker effectiveness by enabling ambient awareness of activities within a sphere of responsibilities, the social online workplace can also become a powerful new knowledgebase.

Attendees of this session will learn:

• The relevance of activity streams and social network sites to enterprise IT environments
• The concept of the Social Online Workplace
• The value of a consolidated activity stream and social graph
• How social infrastructure can be contextually surfaced to support natural work flows
• The impact of social infrastructure on existing IT components, such as email, document management, and search

Larry Cannell is a research director for Gartner Research, in the Gartner for Technical Professionals Collaboration and Content Strategies service. Mr. Cannell covers social and collaborative software, search, and content management, as well as open-source collaboration and content solutions.

Gartner, Inc. (NYSE: IT) is the world's leading information technology research and advisory company.