Putting Collaboration At The Core of Every Business Action

Most enterprise social applications focus on the tools rather than the purpose of the collaboration. Their product and sales teams will tell you that they have a wiki, a blog, document collaboration, a micro blog, a discussion forum and so on. What they won't tell you is what you can do with them. Because, in most cases, they have little idea.

However, leading social applications such as Facebook, Google+ and Quora focus on the purpose of the collaboration. Facebook for example, does not have a separate blogging tool, micro blogging tool and a discussion tool. It combines all tools into a single elegant way to share, discuss and learn. Users can share a thought or a point to a link, discuss it and learn from the conversation. It is very hard to build simple things. Enterprise software designers do not have to re-invent the wheel. They can learn from tools such as Facebook, Google+ and Quora on how to put purpose first and how to put collaboration at the core of every business action.