In my opinion…

As Laurie Buczek illustrates in her post, the real power of a social tool lies almost solely in its users, not in its ability to tag or comment a piece of information. However it seems many solution providers are currently adding a so-called “social” layer to their dinosaur tools and usage habits. Sure an easy upgrade sounds appealing as it gives an impression of immediate ROI at a low effort cost, but this approach will never help tackle the two major barriers to enterprise innovation and productivity: information silos and collaboration culture.

First an enterprise social tool should aim at smashing these silos, not creating more. The first step is to be “mashable”, i.e. provide APIs for easing connectivity, integration and scalability. Better yet, it should act as the “social glue” by bringing existing tools together and progressively filling in the gaps with social knowledge gathered (explicitly or implicitly) from your employees.
Secondly the tool should be flexible enough to handle your current business processes. For example, do not underestimate the resistance of people to change nor the importance of existing tools such as e-mail; work with them rather than against them. This flexibility shall then allow your working culture to gradually evolve and will be followed by the natural emergence of more collaborative processes.
Finally, it must be intuitive and easy to use, or your employees just won’t take it on.

Being user-friendly and providing a flexible framework for letting users and processes progressively evolve towards collaboration is the key to any successful enterprise social tool and, most importantly, to its adoption.