When it comes to increasing productivity (individual and group) have to admit that productivity increased steadily in recent decades, but despite all that companies seem to have achieved improved its financial position nor its employees. Indeed this is the issue of productivity have been so many years, in spite of that evolution and the enormous technological leaps, the processes themselves have not evolved much as expected, has not evolved as the "traditional way of doing things." Fact that indeed the despair of the world, involved
a logic of increased competitiveness not matched by productivity factor. 
inovaçãoea processes create value. The democratization of inovaçãoea accelerated sharing of knowledge is an open, dynamic and viral, that is determining its own new way of doing science, research, learning, etc.. And here's where social networks and platforms social web software such as blogs, wikis and primarily organized around online communities can make companies, and societies in general more productive and effective. I therefore conclude that the future will depend on collaboration in the future entirely on what might be termed the social productivity - getting things done through social networking ad hoc, rather than relying only on individual progress or in collaboration a working group, which is always much more restricted.
The social productivity will grow exponentially and virally , especially as people and services join the revolution that is already underway. And the "magic" of membership, which initially appears complex and difficult to achieve, is to transform people and passive people, actors in a community that identifies with the way they see the world and that gives you an immersive and active participation in business processes and company or organization to which they belong. Imagine even your customers to participate and contribute ideas and opinions about new products and services, as well as on new ways of doing things? Here, I quote Albert Einstein who said "Love is a better teacher than duty.".
For added benefits that have this kind of ad hoc cooperation, going beyond the organizational boundaries? Maybe for ambiguous and uncertain projects and tasks in the next steps and targets may not are at all obvious - designing an innovative product or solve a customer problem, especially prickly, for example. Such projects require conversations with people outside of normal working groups, bursts of insight, "feedback" and creative problem solving, rather than discussions with current teammates, the static knowledge, and pre-defined processes.
Using features such as discussion forums, blogs, wikis and document management, a social network joins staff companies and their work processes with customers, prospects , suppliers, employees, freelancers and third parties.
In the process of socialization, a social network is established. The Social Computing is therefore essentially a way to encode and explore the relationships between people and agents are divided into social spaces with crowds, communities, coun tries, markets, etc..
A very important aspect of these services provided by social networking platforms, which can not be ignored however, is how allowing people to connect with others, building a network of friends and acquaintances. Many of these connections may even work for other companies that are potential or existing customers, and this friendship developer could potentially result in a Dial-Up business opportunity. For many years, executives have used the golf course as his base of social networks 
. Now they can use social networks for this task to concentrate on your game, when play golf!
applications of social computing are now focused on the web with support for online communities, including social networks, wikis, blogs and virtual worlds , providing feedback comment on the social interactive entertainment, scientific, medical and business services, etc.. This also support forecasting techniques and collective decision making, using the combined power of groups and communities to solve difficult problems, as those associated with major disasters and conflicts. Moreover, they are increasingly applied to help analyze how changing technologies and policies can change the political behavior, social and cultural.
No doubt social networking, social bookmarking, forums, blogs, wikis, video sharing and microblogging is the new paths to productivity in businesses, schools and all other ways that human activity takes.
Demonstrate the benefits of social productivity in a way that makes sense for companies to adapt to the demands of the IT market and measurable ways with return on investment, are perhaps difficult to show when it comes to encouraging inovaçãoe solution ; will ambiguous problems instead of their effectiveness in improving individual processes or working group and at less cost.
As mentioned above, social networks or social software is totally focused on empowering conversaçãoea exchange of ideas. Collaborative networks groups are focused on access and organize data in formats of varying capabilities that allow decision-colaboraçãoe the reuse of information or knowledge. Collaborative networks will increasingly be critically important for companies and organizations, helping to establish a culture of operational excellence inovaçãoe materializing.
The Future
Many organizations have been in recent years to adopt Web 2.0 tools to encourage inovaçãoea productivity. And some estãoa begin to embrace social networking as a more effective marketing services and monitoring the behavior of their customers. Moreover, the collaborative networks in the enterprise, today are already as indispensable as e-mail or telephone.
But the application of social computing to improve the quality of decision making, optimization processes and forecast scenarios are not yet on the horizon for businesses, but will certainly be the next steps towards adaptaçãoe survivability of firms in a market globalized and increasingly competitive.
The business is not separated from social change. In the future, social computing is an integral and essential component of strategic and operational management of the company's future, while also turning the Web into a platform truly global, collaborative and social, taking advantage of collective intelligence the planetary level.
a not too distant future (2-5 years) the 3D virtual worlds, games and simulations will also be part of the panoply of interaction es, a company incorporated in the network and will enable social and business networks of the future that will feature highly immersive and further facilitate the socialization regardless of physical location of each person in a given time. More
, are even the social networks the glue that will determine which technologies will be adopted at all times, depending on the evolutionary point where humanity is found!
The Author: Francisco Gonçalves / IT Architect @ Softelabs
interesting articles related to this topic :
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Social networks in the enterprise: Facebook for the Fortune 500
- Burton Group Field Research Study: Social Networking Within The Enterprise
Attachments ():
By Dawn M. Foster: Companies like Communities - productivity through collaboration.
When most people, especially managers, thinking about online communities, then the associated external communities of random groups, sometimes of people who interact around some common interest. Although many online communities fit this category, I have seen a growing number of companies that build communities estãoa workers within their organizations to improve colaboraçãoe significant improvements in productivity. I myself am lucky to have worked in organizations that felt more like a community than a company and in which collaboration was a priority and goal to achieve.
Jitendra Kavathekar talked about this idea into recent post on Business Agility as a way to ROI. He says that collaboration is the essential ingredient for doing things in business today. "Collaboration is one of the key functions of any community, but communities are more than just a place for people to collaborate. In general, large communities bring people together to form a shared identity and cohesion among members. Many companies struggle with ways of getting all your employees can work together as a cohesive group, but increasingly oriented to the community is a great way for employees are driven to become more involved and feel like they are actually part of the corporate identity and not just a cog in the great wheel. Let me give some examples that demonstrate some of the benefits of treating the company as a community.
Collaboration on documents and other information .
In an office environment are all in a situation where several people are in some way to edit a document and send it by e-mail, and always with a high probability losing versions of edits made by the replacement of documents after editing; such, usually translates into a chaos of document management in general. Have a better way so that employees can work on documents is an obvious benefit of community approach that can be easily demonstrated by the time savings and quality improvements resulting aggregate. However, we can take this approach to give the community a step further. Suppose you have three people editing a document containing a proposal for a new business of his company, which is trying to win. What happens when these three people are editing a document that is visible in the community for others to see? You now have a mechanism for additional feedback, ideas and suggestions from people who might never have thought to ask about the proposal. You can even find someone in the process that has a deep knowledge of business and which can offer insights about the company, which otherwise would sisdo unknown. Now, that does not mean that all company documents will be available to everyone. The solutions you choose for your platform for collaboration in the community must have a robust privacy, where you can obtain sensitive documents and control who can see or edit those documents in particular for each project or process.
Better decisions .
Another benefit of a community approach is in the process of decision. I once worked at a company where important decisions were discussed in our online community before implement more changes. These decisions of product strategy can be obtained from functions feedback and ideas from other company employees, who otherwise would not be obtained and be lost forever. Although it certainly can not (and should not) open all decisions to a vote and suggestions of your organization, you can start by asking people their opinions and discuss the merits of various options for which previously decided open to wider discussion. IF act this way because I think that will surprise you with the knowledge gained in places within your organization.
Get Answers.
Every day we encounter something unknown to us. I can try to find the answer on Google or post my question to Twitter, but as if these issues are specific to my organization? In most cases, any other employee, you probably know the answer to your question and can quickly provide you with an answer. I saw this model be used for issues ranging from where to find some piece of documentation (human resource policies, legal documents, etc.) to questions about a newly transferred employee and need some recommendations for a good medical plan that is covered by the insurance company, for example. These issues and ad hoc responses (Q & A) among employees to the diffusion of knowledge are highly compensating for the organization in terms of productivity, but also allow consolidate and solidify the team spirit among employees, simultaneously feeding silos of know-how and functional organization, at no additional cost to the company.
Putting your company to behave as a community can be a great organizational change, particularly in certain types of businesses that must deal with organizational knowledge more intensively, but the benefits can be truly amazing.
Dawn has an MBA from Ashland University and a bachelor's degree in computer science from Kent State University. It uses a combination of technical and business knowledge and education to help companies get real business value of participating in online communities. Dawn regularly blogs about online communities as the author of Fast Wonder Blog
GigaOM WebWorkerDaily's . It is the book's author, Companies and Communities: Participating without being despised . Dawn is currently providing consulting services to Twiki, Inc.
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________For Business implement collaboration-based communities, restricted to the intranet in a secure and flexible, there are many platforms software that adopt this philosophy of collaboration in communities such as described above. therefore conclude that the solution in open-source
of Elgg is one of the most appropriate tools to implement collaboration in the enterprise network in a safe and easy . As such it follows a brief description of it:
The Elgg, begun in 2004, is a motor social networking open source, which feeds all types of social networking environments - from education / training in companies
even sports like rugby. There are extensive range internet communities that result from implementation of the elgg open source platform, such as community live out there, you can visit.
If demand application software to create your own social network or even an official website for your organization , Elgg is a good choice, since it provides the basic building blocks that will need.
In addition to a mechanism "core" robust and extensible, there is a collection of resources you can use, and that is referenced below:
Community ParticipationThanks toElgg Community for their contributions, suggestions and support of Elgg.Thanks to all who are taking the time to contribute plugins, themes Voted best open source platform for social networking in 2008. Advisors | |
A stream of useful activity, which provides a look-a-glance on the activity around the site, and the activity of your friends and your own actions. can filter the flow of activities to include only specific tools or types of action, making this a powerful addition to your social network.Optionally, the flow of activities can be the first port of call for users logging into the site - or you can use it alongside Elgg widget-based dashboard. Users will be presented with new members of the site and power sent directly to the wire . | |
Elgg comes with a standard set of fields that profile may be extended or completely changed by the site administrator. Using the widget framework Elgg powerful, users can select from a database of available widgets to create a complete profile and wealthy.
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| You can track what your friends are doing through the method of notification ; will of your choice. Choose which activity you want to enroll, and have it delivered using the method of service of your choice. E-mail and domestic support are outside the box, and other methods can be added via plugins.
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| Groups Users can create groups around a specific theme and take advantage of an area of collaboration group discussion, group of files and pages in the group. You can create open groups that everyone can participate, and closed groups, where the membership request is made first, and accepted or denied by the group owner.
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A simple blogging tool with some helpful resources: Saving a project (with autosave)Categories
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files The feature enables users to insert files easily include your photos, audio clips and files within posts, pages , comments, topic discussãoe profile fields. The modal window allows users to upload resources and gain access to the files they need, while one build its content.
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Elgg comes with a full file repository that will handle a wide variety of data, including photos, Word documents, files will ; audio, videos, PDFs and more. You can easily flip between lists of files and imagery in order to comfortably find the item you are looking for. Users can view your latest files in your profile, and - using the media embed tool - enter any file on its contents.
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The plugin adds support for microblogging Elgg - like having your own personal service Twitter.can send messages outside the intranet to Twitter so that their users can be notified and report enjoying your Twitter account - or you can implement this only on your intranet in order to allow their employees to remain just updated with the current status of his colleagues within the company.
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Elgg assembles a profile as a grand vision of a member of the site, bringing its activity from the site, as well as external sources. 
Social bookmarking
Access
Other benefits
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