Social computing is an important strategic platform for increasing workplace collaboration and knowledge management. It is also a strategic platform for modernizing enterprise applications to connect collaboration with business processes and transactions. The benefit? Tangible productivity gains and customer value. Addressing both parts of this equation – social-enabling “horizontal” strategic knowledge management functions and “vertical” mission-critical business applications – is key to success and to unlocking the full potential of social computing in the enterprise.

We invite you to read the Unisys point of view white paper on Social Computing and learn where it can be applied within the enterprise for business advantage.

From over 700 million users of Facebook to the power of social computing to bring about democratic change across entire nation states, the disruptive nature of social computing within society at large is well-known. Businesses are recognizing these transformative powers of social computing and are becoming compelled to take action themselves or risk losing value and competitiveness.

Whilst social computing is well-understood in the consumer domain, organizations are still exploring how best to leverage social computing as a strategic platform for increasing workplace collaboration and knowledge management, and as an enabling platform for modernizing enterprise mission-critical applications to connect rich collaboration with business processes and transactions. In addition, businesses need to deliver and be able to measure tangible productivity gains and customer value from their social computing initiatives while at the same time managing inherent risks such as security and privacy.

Correspondingly, organizations need to develop an integrated strategy to maximize the value from their social computing investments and initiatives to address various challenges such as security and privacy and to determine how and where to gain the best return on investment.

As enterprise-class social computing technology matures, we anticipate that the adoption of enterprise social computing will spread and feature-rich platforms will be increasingly used for strategic advantage. We envision a four-phase model for the adoption of social computing in the enterprise starting with the adoption of point solutions and public domain solutions, migration to enterprise-class platforms with a full suite of functionality, and then to rich integration with enterprise processes and mission-critical applications.

Value will be unlocked as organizations integrate these collaborative platforms with transactional business applications to add collaborative workflow capabilities to mission-critical systems in areas such as exception handling and complex problem resolution not addressed within the confines of these core systems. Social computing will additionally emerge as a new strategic organizational capability that extends across the entire enterprise, connecting the workforce, customers and partners, helping us better manage organizational knowledge and providing human-centric collaboration capabilities to support mission-critical business processes and functions.

There are concrete steps organizations can take today in order to address both parts of the enterprise opportunity around social computing in terms of “horizontal” strategic knowledge management and innovation functions and “vertical” mission-critical business applications. Addressing both parts of this equation is key to success and to unlocking the full potential of social computing in the enterprise.

At Unisys, we see social computing as an integral part of our Application Modernization and Outsourcing portfolio. In addition to social computing advisory and implementation services, we can help you incorporate a social computing strategy within your overall plans for application modernization. We invite you to visit the links to our relevant portfolio solutions:

• Application Advisory Solutions
• Application Modernization Solutions