Enterprise 2.0 in Boston defines the new Social Workplace

After spending the past 3 days attending the Enterprise 2.0 conference it has become even clearer in my mind that social media and social networking has an important part to play in the future of enterprise collaboration but requires a great deal more education and understanding by the key decision makers. We need to spend more time understanding the use cases and cultural challenges of creating social wrappers around corporate information and seeding these inside corporate social networks, its not about replacing email as much as empowering your employees to connect with people, customers and partners in a way that's more socially engaging. Its important to remember that if we are to learn anything from the adoption success of web flavoured social content its that its not about IT or technology - its about user experience. The companies who put user experience above IT and Technology will create a competitive advantage by attracting the best employees who can be far more productive while still ensuring that content and information is secure.

Another key challenge is going to be scalability and enterprise standards for social collaboration platforms in the workplace not to forget the compliant and secure nature of content management required in many sectors such as government, banking and legal.

It seems that the social workplace is going to be an increasingly important evolution for business but we are still in the very early days of understanding the key use cases and value propositions experienced by the social marketplace through web 2.0 but what is clear will be the requirement to have far better methods of sharing information and working in virtual dispersed teams, email is not dead yet but we must find better communication methods like micro-blogging, video sharing and social bookmarking if we are ever going to be able to work effectively in the digital world.