The Social Factor: Innovate, Ignite, and Win through Mass Collaboration and Social Networking

The Factor: Innovate, Ignite, and Win Through Mass Collaboration and Networking Maria Azua (Upper Saddle River, NJ. IBM Press, 2010) Communications and computing technologies are foundation for today's mobile, global, information-rich society. However, tools are just part of picture. The Factor presents an engaging perspective on evolution of both tools and teamwork styles. Maria Azua, vice president for IBM enterprise initiatives, founder of IBM's Technology Adoption Program, and prolific innovator, has worked with ten contributing authors to gather a collection of trends, tutorials, minicase studies, and managerial insights to help organizations leverage new possibilities presented by networking. As a developer and lead user of collaboration and social-networking technologies, IBM has a unique and valuable perspective to share. Aside from few passages that advertise IBM solutions, this book offers a balanced perspective addressed to a broad base of readers and a handy introduction to Web 2.0 terms and concepts. Arguing that the Age fundamentally changes way we communicate, socialize, and collaborate to create a better world, Azua and her contributors present a series of chapters that each introduces a different thread in a patchwork quilt of collaborative and technologies, beginning in first chapter with a historical perspective that draws parallels between current developments and arrival of railroads, telegraph lines, radio, and television. As digital universe approaches three trillion gigabytes, Azua suggests that social networking certainly contributes to mind-numbing growth of information, but ironically, tools are also best way to deal with this explosion. In Age, formal team leadership often plays a subordinate role to connectors, those who can facilitate communication and maintain network linkages. Chapter 2, Social Age Organizations, illustrates this point with a minicase describing a company that complemented its official structure with a virtual organization to improve recruiting, employee communication, and access to research information. Wikis and tags and blogs, oh my! The following three chapters provide a thorough yet refreshingly readable introduction to popular Web 2.0 technologies. In addition, they identify best practices and recommendations, supported by IBM's own experiences, for leveraging each approach to IT-assisted collaboration. Wikis, for instance, are especially useful for capturing tacit knowledge, and blogs offer a useful venue for pushing information to an interested community. Beyond these basic tools and terminologies, The Factor also offers an introduction to some key concepts for understanding universe of networking. For instance, Chapter 5 Tagging and Clouds explains how communities can increase value of content collections by interacting with them. Informal, collaboratively constructed taxonomies, known as folksonomies, have significantly increased search efficiencies and helped organizations locate human experts. …