My 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference Notes: UC + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds?

  

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Here is another in a series of notes on the 2011 Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston. This covers the session UC + Social Computing = Best of Both Worlds? Irwin Lazar, Analyst, Nemertes Research served as the moderator. Panelists include: Chris Morace, Senior Vice President of Business Development, Jive Software, Ted Stanton, Executive Consultant and Strategist, IBM Smart Work, Christian Finn, Director, SharePoint Product Management, Microsoft, and Mike Gotta, Senior Technical Solution Marketing Manager for Enterprise Social Software, Cisco.

The session description states, “Unified Communications,” the intersection of voice, video, messaging, and conferencing and social computing largely exists in silos. The former is largely driven by telecom managers looking to simplify services or better meet the needs of distributed workers, while the latter often evolves organically driven by individual line-of-business needs. But integrating social computing’s ability to help people locate subject matter experts, with UC’s ability to see availability in real-time represents the chocolate-meets-peanut butter moment in collaboration. During this session we’ll look at how enterprise collaboration strategies are evolving to integrate UC and social computing, and how vendors are increasingly adding real-time and social collaboration capabilities to their products.”

Irwin said a few years ago this topic did not seem relevant. Now it does. Mike began said the most interesting interaction of UC and social is in micro-blogging. It is similar to IM. Above that is getting people connected so they can get work done.  Christian said the future is now with UC and social and MicroSoft offers it in their products so you can move immediately from asynchronous social to instant communications. Ted said he agrees with all comments so far but also feels it is Important to integrate both of these into traditional business apps like CRM.  Chris said you can use social to set up real time conversationbu the issue is how do you make this seemless. Chris said that the social graph is integrating old lists of relationships and can support the UC social integration and the buddy list will disappear.

Mike said that the ability to have the underlying data on relationships to help us make connections through all the channels is key.  Christian said that there are a number of hurtles to get to Chris’s image of the social graph. Going beyond the enterprise relationships is where it gets harder to make the connections. The new levels of connections may spook some people when they get contacted out of the blue because of the greater connectivity. I find this with Skype when get out of context messages from people I do not know.

Chris raises the privacy issues. There are possibilities for layering relationships with different permission levels. People have told me about this for Skype but I need one of the reverse mentors that Lowe’s has. Ted discussed the new levels of presence. He feels the buddy list is still viable. There is room for new levels of granularity. It was asked if we need a consolidated directory. Ted said that federation is an issue as it is a multi-vendor field.  Christian said this is hard to do. He added that people will not want to go to the trouble of creating permission levels. Mike said you need to have policy-based management.

Irwin then asked how they see companies are justifying the connection of social and UC. Mike said that customer satisfaction is the top driver. This is the customer who has both sides of the connection and wants the connection to work. Christian said the killer app is web conferencing. It saves real money and promotes real time collaboration. Mike added that now we expect all devices including tablets to support web conferencing. Chris said HD quality is not needed. The high-end devices and video quality that are found in some devices for senior execs are not required for most business use. There is a concept of good enough.

Irwin asked about the customer demand for social and phone integration. Chris said it is not large. Christian said it already comes with the product, SharePoint, so it is harder to gauge demand. People do want to be able to connect with people in the system wherever they are. Mike added that vendors need to be sure to design things for ease of interaction.

Irwin asked about the stakeholders and are the UC people and the social world connected. Ted said that the UC people are usually in IT while the social team is often in marketing.  The issue of integration is helping to break down some of the silos. The smaller organizations do this better as there is less separation between teams. Christian there is still a divide between the two teams and they have different interests and business cases. However, the end user wants things connected.  Mike said that IT governance is important to bring the two teams together about service levels. Christian added that the cloud will accelerate this integration.