White Papers about Social Computing

The last week I read two white papers about Social Computing. The first was from Socialtext, Five Best Practices for Enterprise Success. And the second was from NewsGator, Delivering ROI with Enterprise Social Computing. Both papers were interesting, since I’m interesting to find out what is the additional benefit for a company to use social software (components). Until now, I found no independently research about experience with such software. Mostly the papers speak about Fortune 100 companies. But the most companies are members of the SMB market.

The Socialtext white paper indicates that “employees spend up to 25 % of their day looking for information, which can be 25 % of your staff costs” (based on a IDC research). Further it mentioned, that “only 13 % of people can find someone with a particular area of expertise in their own company” (based on an IBM study). Social software should help to reduce the time to find the information or the people.

NewsGator say in the future, all computing will be social. They say, that by reducing the email volumne and support costs are one of the reasons to use social software. Further, the travelling cost can be reduced. Besides this most of the people found their current position by networking. But this could only a reason if they find the new job inside of the company.