Reading the crystal ball for 2012

Exhausted from culinary extravaganza and exuberant festivity, I'm starting the year with a worthwhile collation of some of the predictions for "Social Business in 2012", which  I stumbled across during my post-xmas recovery reading:

  • In his blogpost "Predictions For 2012 From An Employee Perspective" Alan Lepofsky starts with a shocker: 2012 will be the year employees start hating social software. He addresses the growing discomfort of social software users while taming activity streams and managing a growing number of contacts or communities. And here´s the relief, as he states: "I believe in 2012 we will see a lot of progress made in filtering and managing streams. Some of this will require manual intervention and some will happen automatically by a combination of algorithms and magic." Now this seems to be acutely in line with the Refinder thinking ....

  • Dachis Group is publishing a full dozen of valid "Social Business Predictions for 2012", showcasing the full breadth of impactful major trends, including social shifts to mobile, the overhauling of social intranets or the blurring lines between internal and external social business efforts. They close with the statement, that "Social business becomes less art, and more science" as  the analytic and scientific approach is moving into the fore from tools and frameworks to services and methodologies.

  • IBM chimes into this theme in their "IBM´s Social Business Predictions for 2012", emphasizing on social analytics, gamification and the emergence of the community managers role to "manage the new processes and communities, to measure their effectiveness, and to educate and enable the workforce to participate."

  • Jane Hart summons 2012 as "The Year of Learning in a Social Business": "As many others explain, social business will change the way we do everything, as organisations move from being traditional hierarchical businesses to networked organisations.”Social” will not just be something that is bolted-on to traditional processes but will underpin a fundamental new approach to working – and learning."

  • Finally let me point you towards the always brilliant Dion Hinchcliffe, who springs for six big ideas "How Digital Business Will Evolve in 2012". His thoughts are all about how to cope with the dynamics of change and disruption happening to businesses, as "the mismatch between businesses today and the digital world is growing wider, not narrower, at the moment." He does not simply adjure technology trends, instead he prescibes, how to "get out ahead and modify the way we think about metabolizing technology in the enterprise".

Have a good read and an even better new year.

 

 

 
 

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