Social Media - Fit for the Workplace?

At a recent CW500 I was privileged to listen to and debate with JP Rangaswami (of http://confusedofcalcutta.com - a senior BT director, past Global CIO of Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein etc.). about the future of corporate information, and specifically his assertion that corporates need to adopt social networking technologies as part of their internal interaction and communication infrastructure. His premise is that social networking is a (the?) IT toolkit that most bright young people understand and use in interacting with their peers to achieve things, solve problems etc., and in order to attract those bright young people into our businesses we need to adopt the tools and technologies they are comfortable with and understand how to use into our businesses, so that we can facilitate them in solving business problems and generating business achievement. If companies do not adopt social networking & media technologies into their internal IT platforms they will disadvantage and inhibit these bright young people from achieving, and ultimately cause the best of them to select as employers companies who have adopted social media technologies above those companies still stuck in the dark ages.

If JP is correct, and I think he is, then the Social Media Landscape is going to change dramatically - not only is it going to become much more ubiquitous, but it will be the new orthodoxy, with massively higher penetration - use of it will become a required skillset for business in the way that word processing, spreadsheets and email are the essential general purpose business technology tools of today.

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