The Future of Collaborative Networks

Last week I wrote at Ostatic about The Future of Collaborative Networks. It is an important post that I’ll be building on in the coming months. This first post introduces Collaborative Networks and explains the differences between these and social software and social networks.

Rather than focusing on socialization, one to one interactions and individual enrichment, businesses must be concerned with creating an information fabric within their organizations. This information fabric is a federation of content from the multiplicity of data and application silos utilized on a daily basis; such as, ERP, CRM, file servers, email, databases, web-services infrastructures, etc. When you make this information fabric easy to edit between groups of individuals in a dynamic, secure, governed and real-time manner, it creates a Collaborative Network.

This is very different from social networks or social software, which is focused entirely on enabling conversations. Collaborative Networks are focused on groups accessing and organizing data into actionable formats that enable decision making, collaboration and reuse. Collaborative Networks will increasingly be critically important to business and organizations by helping to establish a culture of innovation and by delivering operational excellence.

via The Future of Collaborative Networks.

I encourage you to read the full post. It provides insight into how we think about enterprise collaboration here at MindTouch and it also makes it clear where we will continue to steer the product.