You are right that socializing isn’t just chatting in the hallway and we’ll definitely have to bring more human interaction into the enterprise. But still, in many areas, interaction is a means to accomplish our goals, not the goal itself, we must not forget that when designing more efficient ways to collaborate.

Regarding the cases where you don’t take the effort to previously research existing knowledge in the enterprise, this is just a reflection of how we work outside virtual environments – we don’t shout around “anyone knows this?” before starting our tasks. But the major problem with “search first” approaches is that, in most cases, people just don’t see a need for searching, at least from my experience. They delve into their tasks and until they hit some barrier, they will not spend any time doing “parallel” social tasks. People will eventually adapt to a new way of working, but do they really need to?

Let me briefly comment on this post. You say that we are not in our companies “to socialize” but what we think that happens is that we have a wrong concept of what it means to be social. Socializing should be read as interacting with others, not as throwing conversation away while having coffee. And thus socializing is essential to the work itself, expect if you work in a Ford-like assembly line. As J P Rangaswami from Salesforce shared with the audience at the Social Business Summit in London recently, “We’ve engineered social out of business” and now we need to bring it back.

Regarding the “You could search for people or information related to that report before actually starting the task, but in most cases you won’t” I firmly believe that we need to stop reinventing the wheel inside the enterprise and this means re-using existing information and knowledge. Easier said than done as this may mean that people need to re-learn how to work.

As for “searching for the right person/data may require a lot of effort” I really think that social software has a lot of advantages regarding other existing techs in the enterprise.

Regarding “current social enterprise tools are not there yet”, I think you have a point there: maybe they are not all designed (or used in a way to) stimulate serendipity and emergent outcomes.

All in all, fascinating discussion, we need to continue the conversation one of these days… oh, wait, we are already continuing the conversation

PS – I strongly advise you to check @elsua ‘s thoughts on this. I’ll invite him to check this blog post

Tive o conhecimento de o site coresp.com ja se encontra online, e tem informação para quem pretende recuperar o dominio caso ainda não o tenho feito.

If rules aren’t needed, why have them? Instead of rules, linchpins need that their companies effectively assess their failures and successes. I guess you could see it as a-posteriori rules…

Either way, I don’t think this lead to the company questioning its own existence. Questioning its structure, with all that it entails, yes, but not its existence…