I sense we are still in the early stages of how ‘social ways of working’ can create value. Communications, engagement and knowledge sharing are early ‘adopters’ of ‘social’ but the internal audience’s affection with tools may eventually fade and move on to alternative channels. The real value from these ‘social’ tools comes when we explore how to utilise them for innovation, crowdsourcing, validation and creating more open, transparent and democratic structures within organisations.

By using collaboration and open business tools like Jive and O365 (Yammer) the chance to develop new ways of working is immense. Rapid validation of innovation and and organisational structures are enticing but the opportunity to bring democratic approaches into areas such as product development, strategy and governance can truly change the way colleagues, suppliers, customers and leaders can develop organisations for the future rather than bleak rigid corporations built on ‘war-like’ structures and sound bites.