Peter Fingar’s Jan 2011 column is “The Meaning of 21st Century Business: Unleashing the Power Within Using Social Networks” gives a perspective on where business finds itself in 2011, and how cloud and social computing relateas part of the Jan edition of BPTrends.

He refers to this amazing video about how the world longevity and wealth has changed over time.  If you have not seen it yet, it is well worth the view:

He goes on to cover some of the more interesting aspects of technology, and how that has changed the world. What does all this mean?

To keep abreast of the dramatic change going on in the world, smart companies are increasingly turning to social networks to:

• Tap the wisdom of crowds
• Harness the power of weak connections
• Form work groups inside and outside the firm
• Manage knowledge via wikis
• Tweet on real-time activities
• Incorporate social computing into Business Process Management (BPM)
• Search profiles to find needed human resources
• Retain and transfer the knowledge of experienced workers leaving the workforce

I particularly liked this quote from Andy Mulholland:

Let me first start by describing my problem: I don’t need more communications, or even more formats. What I need is focus. As a part operational and part knowledge worker, I want to know the issues and questions that matter operationally, and the information updates on the topics that matter.

That is quite important.  Social software as it exists today, outside of the enterprise (e.g. Facebook, Linked-In, Twitter, etc.) provides primarily communications.  Enterprise Social Software will need to add “focus” to help people work.  I believe that focus will be the primary distinction between ESS and social network software.

Let me close with this excerpt that sums the article up:

What’s needed is the capability for business people to have forward-looking realtime business analytics, informed by both business activity monitoring and enterprise social networks, to make fully informed decisions. Okay, that’s the needed dashboard. They will also need and accelerator and steering wheel so they can directly manipulate end-to-end, multi-company collaborative and transactional processes at the speed of business without IT intervention!

Read the complete article: “The Meaning of 21st Century Business: Unleashing the Power Within Using Social Networks”