Social networking – not a new idea for the twenty-something generation – but an idea that has finally crossed over into the corporate boardroom thanks to customer demand and open standards technologies built on service-oriented architectures (SOA).
With 20% of employees at large companies now contributing to blogs, social networks, Wikis, and other Web 2.0 services (according to IDC in a survey of 197 workers), the trend is no surprise, with companies finding ways to capitalize on this activity with their own in-house social networks.
Such activities have grown, in part, due to an awareness of the competitive advantages organizations can gain by incorporating more interactive and context-aware collaboration capabilities. These capabilities have originated from consumer-led Internet activities, such as Wikipedia, Google Search, and Amazon.
