In the past six months, Southeastern [a UK railway operator] has leveraged Socialtext Connect, a flexible and robust developer toolset built on our REST API that enables developers to socially enable existing systems of record, such as ERP, CRM, or content management systems. The Socialtext solution, now integrated into the Southeastern infrastructure, enables employees to access train status information on the fly, in real-time with visibility across the entire workforce. By providing Southeastern with a more efficient way to share knowledge, expertise, ideas and information, the company can more quickly respond to change and serve their patrons effectively.

And you thought social inside the enterprise was all about staff telling each other what they had for lunch?

I’ve never been much of a futurist, which you might find odd since I spend a lot of time talking about new fangled ideas like ‘social business’ and ‘government 2.0’. From my perspective, none of this is futuristic – it is happening right here, right now if you look around. Reflecting on this week’s Intranets2012 conference and Dion Hinchcliffe’s visit to Australia, I thought it might be worthwhile identifying some of the ideas and trends that I see impacting intranets right now and into the immediate future.

Cross posted from the Headshift Asia Pacific blog. I talk about three points in more detail: Social intranets, mobile and the role of design thinking.

Dion Hinchcliffe is visting Australia this week to promote his new book, Social Business by Design, co-authored with Peter Kim. The Headshift Asia Pacific team have been busy lining up speaking events and media interviews all week, however Dion and I have found time to put together a short whitepaper on the state of social business in Australia. This paper provides that all important Australian perspective on the trends and ideas outlines in Dion's book. The paper will be published online later today, but while you are waiting we've posted a video talking about some of the highlights: The criteria for the case studies included in the paper, the differences between Australia and the global experience of Social Business and key insights.

UPDATE: The paper is now available to read and download from SlideShare.

BTW if you are interested in attending either of Dion's workshops tomorrow, Social Business 101 (in the morning) and The Consumerisation of IT (in the afternoon) please contact the Headshift team by email at hello@headshift.com.au to request a last minute registration!

If Social Business is really transforming the way we do business why are most of the stories and cases out there focused on changes to a single business function like marketing, human resources, or customer service? Shouldn’t it act as a change across several of these functions, or for that matter will these functions go away or change so fundamentally that we can no longer tell them apart?

...If these hold out commonly, then we are starting to see the cracks in the Value Chain model at least in terms of the separation of functional areas.

This is an interesting post (and follow-up), but an unfortunate mistake in Rawn Shah's argument is that he appears to have interpreted the Value Chain as something that describes organisational structure, when in fact it is a model of activities.

Briefly: Porter's Value Chain concept was introduced in 1985 as a tool to help large organisations make a more holistic cost analysis of their competitive position. It is true that this concept was developed primarily for product-based businesses, but has been adapted for service and knowledge-based organisations. Some people also use the model for qualitative analysis.

But Shah's main question about organisational structure are worth considering through the lens of the Value Chain. My questions from this perspective are:

• What is the impact of Social Business on different activities in the Value Chain?
• Are organisations reconfiguring themselves enough to completely optimise the linkages between activities, bearing in mind what is possible as a Social Business?

Shah's example of Social Learning is actually an excellent example of this shift in practice but isn't a failure of the Value Chain. "Learning" activity is still happening, just in a different way. The question about structure is really about if the centralised corporate training function is actually adding enough value in this new environment.

More broadly I believe that Social Business is starting to have an impact, but most organisations have not fully optimised for it. Time to use the Value Chain to drive change, rather than throwing the baby out with the bath water.

We are pleased to announce that we are hosting a visit to Australia by internationally recognised business strategist and enterprise architect, Dion Hinchcliffe. He will be in Australia between Monday 14th – Friday 18th May, 2012 to promote his forthcoming book, Social Business by Design (co-authored with Peter Kim).

Cross-posted from the Headshift Asia Pacific blog, where you'll find more details about Dion's visit to Australia in May.

Everyone talks about collaboration in the workplace today but what does it really mean? How do you get from here to there? Every snake oil salesman is selling social something: enterprise social; social learning; social CRM; etc. For me boils down to three principles.

In my post about Designing Social Workplaces, I discussed a model for collaboration built around social networks, observable work, and insights and analysis. However, I quite like the nuance in Harold Jarche's post, Making collaborative work work where he talks about stepping through Narration of Work, then Transparency and finally Shared Power as a basic roadmap for creating a collaborative workplace.

According to Jeff Dachis, CEO of Dachis Group, social is the currency of engagement.  While social technology has introduced a seemingly endless array of new interaction methods, in the end it is all about solving real business problems.  Companies do not become social businesses for the heck of it. They embrace social to solve specific business problems because it offers a more effective way of doing talent management, supply chain collaboration, business agility, risk management, and more successful products to driving revenue.  Social drives adaptation.

The state of social is not what you might expect.  Sandy Carter of IBM shared that governments and regulated industries have the highest adoption rate of social.  Eighty four percent of the top thirty five banks have a social media strategy and all G7 governments have embedded social in their Government 2.0 initiatives.  At a country level, German companies are the leading adopters of social business practices and are the most successful at it.  These companies embedded social first internally by folding it into their processes and getting that to work before extending social externally to engage with customers.

Through the lens that social is about solving real business problems, the question becomes just how to wade through all the hype, myths and hubris to realize (and prove) its potential.   Embracing the organizing principles of social business comes down to change management.  You know the drill, you’ve been through it before - it starts with people, process and ends with technology.  The exact opposite of what is being advocated by the thousands of technology vendors and consultants shouting from the social bandwagon.

Dachis Group's 2012 Social Business Summit seven city global tour kicked off in Austin this week (the Summit in Singapore takes place on the 26th July). Writing in Forbes magazine, Christine Crandell provides an excellent review of the Austin event and outlines some key points about what Social Business is and isn't. Its a great overview on the state of Social Business if you are still trying to get your head around the idea or maybe you are just little skeptical.