What's wrong with being asocial ?

What's wrong with the world today ? Why do every single piece of software be social these days ? I can't think of one product release where the term social isn't mentioned. Of course social media is responsible for generating all of the changes in software engineering the last 5 years, at least in web-related stuff. But there are limits. It's not by copying functionality in software that you create a business value, it's most of the time the other way around. We've seen this with the first version of sharepoint where IT generated the demand for collaboration and not the business departments, that didn't really worked out well. It's only a couple of years later when business decided that they did want to collaborate in an electronic way that we've started to see successful sharepoint projects. The same goes for the social enterprise or Enterprise Social Networks. It's not because people use this kind of functionality in their free time that it's useful in the enterprise. Where's the business need for all of this ?

Ok, seriously, there is a need for working differently than a few years ago. People are working at flexible locations and are connected all of the time. Surely, that thrives a need for tools to better communicate with each other in the form of projects, topics, workgroups, ....
Organisations are growing every day and the current knowledge worker has more specialties than we've ever seen before. This generates a need for an "internal linkedin", where people can update their own curriculum, making it easier for coworkers to go and search for specific knowledge within the organisation.
Information feeds like twitter are a huge source of knowledge, why not use as an internal feed for people working in one organisation in search of similar cases, knowledge, experiences.
But is it al worth a new software tool ? Why not integrate it in the current sharepoint ? And how to finance all of this ?
What we see at our customers' sites is that budgets for intranets are limited. HR, which is responsible for an intranet most of the time, isn't that fond of spending all that much money on technology. According to the
Altimiter Group, average corporate spending on social business was $833,000 in 2010. That number includes 12 expenses, only one of which is technology. And as we've seen with the introduction of collaborative portals, it's not only about technology. You need a philosophy, community managers and some change management to make an Enterprise Social Network work.

When you put all those things together you can only conclude that the introduction of an Enterprise Social Network is a gradual introduction in an organisation. Start small, with a limited budget to create some first seeds. This is a scenario where Acquia Commons fits perfectly.

• There are no license for Acquia Commons.
• It's an open source software driven by a large community, which makes innovation reality (Within two days of Google+ launching in limited test mode, the Drupal community had developed an integration module for Acquia Commons).
• Acquia Commons is  a content management framework, which alows you to integrate it in the existing environment and to let it evolve together with the adoption of an Enterprise Social Network in the organisation
• With the new Acquia Commons 3, the usability has improved and it let's you add users and departments as you go, without the need of training all new users of your ESN.