John Labriola — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 12:14:23 GMT

Hey Paul,

Great piece, while I have read about thsi elsewhere, I think you did a good job consolidating some good data references and putting it in a language most people can understand. I sent it to a few stakeholders and other partners from a project I am working on.

I am the position of, as Chris Avore put it, addressing the pipe dream. About more than year ago my organization brought an out of the box social enterprise solution thinking it would address their needs. Well it kinda did, but not really. I was hired with some other people about 6 months ago to try to understand better our users. We learned a lot about their real life social interactions and are now starting to educating our business partners on social interaction design. For example we were talking about the subject of ties, and how we should enhance the strong ties (which we don’t do at all) and build up the weak ones (which we kinda do a little).

Our problem now is that we must customize the enterprise tool or build extra custom components to do what we need. So in some ways I agree with Chris Avore, many enterprise companies are buying products and expecting amazing results. But that is not happening. If their smart they can get a good team int there to come in and straighten things out.

I think that it is up to us to educate the enterprises as well as the enterprise solution providers. I am hoping that the company that provider our software will look at what we’re doing to learn how they can adopt their software. It may be a pipe dream, but I can at least hope.

Boxes and Arrows: Comments by John Labriola