Jon Udell's InfoWorld article, "The social enterprise" gives an excellent overview of the enterprise social software landscape and the vendors who are looking to make social software meaningful as a tool for business. He describes social software as whatever supports our actual human interaction in virtual spaces, whether its involved with creating and sharing knowledge or to enrich relationship networks that support business processes. The goal for these tools is to return some social context to the networked business activities we participate in via the Internet.

Udell says that the present set of tools easily handle the "who knows who" relationships. This is seen in the analysis tools that are elbowing for space in the enterprise world. The real problem, however, is figuring out "who knows what". The new killer app will deliver relationships that salespeople can leverage, pointing to relationship mapping and introductions for sales opportunities. But this type of inference seems to rely on the consent of participants with regard to private information about who they contact and what they discuss. It seems a tricky balance to consent to analysis of your interactions with people while not consenting to the release of private or sensitive information. It seems a necessary measure to making social software effective, and Udell points to the need for rules of engagement within this social environment. Arguing that transparency and privacy can coexist, David Gilmour says that "Privacy privileges are constructive when applied to who-knows-what and who-knows-who ... but, we don't think you're entitled to privacy about whether you're available for interaction." Makes sense, but I'm not sure I'd want to interact with someone unless I fist knew what and who they knew.

The direction of social software in the enterprise is interesting to me, but while sales force seems to be a better target for vendors, I'm mainly interested in how it impacts knowledge work. While public networks seem to need to focus on protecting privacy, the corporate enterprise should not have to be as concerned with privacy regarding "who knows who" and "who knows what" information. In the intranet, we should be able to determine where the expertise lies in the organization (who knows what) and how to branch out from that person to their network (who knows who) to build our own network of social connection. This is the promise of software, for me. It enables connections to be made between people who are not connected in meatspace because they don't fall within the same business unit, subject matter or political lines of demarcation. Cross-line networking is where innovation might occur when insular knowledge is allowed to mix and spawn new knowledge. It's much harder to quantify how knowledge work impacts revenue, but I have no doubt that making knowledge flow more effective and efficient will have a positive impact on product development and transitively revenue. I'm sure it has as much impact on business revenue as mapping relationships and making introductions for sales opportunities.