Heath Brownsworth

The technology streams of cloud, mobile, and social definitely seem to be on a convergence trajectory. As mobile and social are largely born of the cloud, or at a minimum have been enabled because of the the cloud, this should not come as a complete surprise.  However, what is interesting is that cloud is such an able enabler that social and mobile are moving so fast that the enterprise community is struggling to internalize these concepts and leverage them in daily business.

In his blog, A Software Insider’s Point of View, Ray Wang published an entry today entitled Quips: The Slide Some Vendors Won’t Let Me Show On Social Media Tools that pokes fun at Social Media but highlights how most enterprises don’t quite know what to make of social media or more specifically the ‘social enterprise’.  While social outside of the enterprise largely focuses on ‘self’, social inside the the enterprise is taking on a meaning more akin to ‘engaged’.  The big question is how, and the current selection of social media tools does not get us there.

Mobile at first blush may seem to be on more solid footing, but as the primary gateway to all things social, mobile and and social are inextricably linked. Additionally, mobile has a unique challenge that is manifesting itself in many enterprises around the globe, BYOD.  Bring your Own Device, or BYOD for short, is becoming a policy in many organizations.  Smartphones are expensive and there is a continuous cycle of new models and versions that makes it impossible to stay current.  These two reasons weigh heavy on IT departments and provide insight as to why they are beginning to favor BYOD even if it means relinquishing some control.  Companies are usually willing to pay for part, or all, of the service in exchange for being able to wipe the device of enterprise data, but beyond that employees are more or less on their own in terms of device management and support.

There is little debate that both social and mobile will be two of the biggest topics in 2012, but a great deal of the interest will be drivin by the efforts to find social and mobile an identity within the enterprise that makes sense to both employees and shareholders.

Heath-

(Cross-posted @ Skywriting)