social business design

Rumors of my demise have been greatly exaggerated.

~Mark Twain

Originally posted on the Collaboratory

Jeff Dachis and I recently returned from the Web 2.0 Expo in New York—a near week long flurry of activity that brings together technology, business and design amongst other things. We co-presented a somewhat uniquely titled session called “Social Business Design: It’s Clobberin’ Time”.

If you found some value in the first iteration of "Social Business by Design" you may want to take a look at this current version. It includes double the content including video footage from the Drupal7 open design initiative. Also, you'll notice the slide design has been updated to reflect the current identity system of Dachis Group. There's also additional thinking around business culture and the dynamics between networks and hierarchies. Hope you find it useful.

It's been called micro-blogging, micro-sharing and a variety of other phrases including the word ambient. But there's a significant attribute that's been less discussed and is critical to both business and social implications regarding how we live and work. Technology allows us to signal our every movement, thought, action and status in real time. It's pretty powerful stuff and why millions of people are addicted to telling their own social sytems what they are doing whether it be a status update on Facebook or a tweet.

We've been doing a bit of thinking on how organizations can re-design themselves as social systems which produce emergent outcomes—that is, results which move business forward and tend to emerge in an organic fashion. Twitter's growth due to end user innovation, an open API, and other drivers are an example of this.

We are now seeing conferences dedicated solely to Twitter—the latest was Jeff Pulver's 140Char held in NYC. Like many others who were not at the event, I was able to attend virtually through following tweets. After a while I thought to myself—wait a minute, we're still just talking about "social media" in silos. What about the bigger picture? And what do you ask is the big picture?

Great question.