Start by asking yourself if your organization faces any of these challenges:

• Do you need a more efficient, yet informal way for small groups and teams within your organisation and supply chain to collaborate and problem solve (outside of e-mail)?
• Do you spend too much time trying to track down the current experts on certain topics within your organisation?
• Do you want to do more to promote creativity and the sharing of knowledge and key information resources within your organisation?
• Do you have a sense for the critical pockets of knowledge and expertise within your organisation?
• Is there much opportunity for people to communicate and connect across organisational boundaries, such as departments or locations, to solve problems in an interdisciplinary way?
• Are you worried about losing critical expertise and tacit knowledge as key staff retires or move on to other opportunities?
• Are you looking for way to attract and retain younger talent?

Next steps

If you answered "yes" to any of the above questions, here are some ways that you can get started exploring how social software can help address productivity challenges.

Looking internally:

• Find fertile ground for a social software pilot.
• Search for departments or small teams that might be using social networking software already, perhaps through a hosted service model.
• Locate potential early adoption groups within the organization that would be visible and credible champions to drive viral adoption in an organization-wide rollout.
• Identify collaborative projects that are unstructured and don't have existing work plans or workflows established.

Looking externally:

• Scan the Internet for examples of corporations with external blogs and investigate how they are using them to communicate with customers.
• Locate a recognised industry expert in one of your areas of interest who has an active blog. Does she or he also have a set of social bookmarks at a site such as de.lici.ous? Could these blogs and bookmarks be valuable to you in your professional development? Could they be valuable to a larger team working on a related project?
• Investigate the policies and guidelines other companies have put in place on the appropriate use of their social software applications.
• Check in with industry analysts and researchers on how business is using and will use social software in the future.
• Investigate available product offerings, such as IBM Lotus' Connections software.

» For more information, do check out the business benefits of social computing by clicking here.

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