Best of breed? Not always the best strategy for social computing solutions.

Social computing success depends on people and their participation, not technology

When it comes to social computing in the enterprise, it's absolutely critical to be sure that the technology you chose solves a real business problem - not someone else's problem, but a real business problem in your organization.  To see any value from your social computing investment, people have to participate.  To encourage participation, the technology has to be easily accessible from the user's "comfort zone."

I often tell my clients that if they really want to encourage participation in collaboration solutions, they need to bring the solution to where people work - which for most users is Microsoft Office and their e-mail client.  More and more today, we can add SharePoint to that mix.  There are definitely social computing solutions that have far better capabilities than SharePoint in many scenarios.  For example, I can't think of anyone who really loves the wiki features in MOSS 2007.  Moreover, several third party products can be directly integrated into SharePoint making integration appear to be more or less seamless to the end user.  However, each new product integration adds complexity to the IT infrastructure and each new system has its own set of best practices and norms that raise the entry cost for both IT and end users.  When clients tell me that they have adopted a "best of breed" approach for social computing, I can't help but wonder if they have considered all of the implications of multiple software products and vendors in their environment.

I think a better approach is to first identify the business problem you are trying to solve and second, explore the features of your "comfort zone" applications to see whether or not you can solve the problem without introducing additional complexity to your IT and end user environments.  When I hear clients tell me that "we have everything" in their mix of social computing technologies, I often think "then you really have nothing."  Best of breed solutions can often increase cost.  Overlapping functionality creates the opportunity to introduce information silos - exactly what we are trying to break down with collaboration solutions.  It may be better to give up a "nice to have" feature for the value of increased clarity for end users and ease of maintenance for IT.  At the end of the day, success of your social computing solution depends on people and their participation, not technology, so it's almost always best to keep it simple to start.

• Microsoft
• SharePoint
• social computing