Social software, emerging from the primordial ooze of Web 2.0 startups and mash-ups, is on the radar of most companies. IT is becoming a fundamentally social medium in which the technology itself will be transparent to users.

However, it is the boosting of social interactions, along with changes in the nature of work as a result of earlier IT investments, which holds the promise of dramatically raising organisational effectiveness.

A collection of converging forces is placing a renewed focus on social science-related skills, such as sociology, psychology and communications.

Social networking communities are in common use among consumers. Most targets for IT execution are tied to helping people engage in an ever-broader range of interactions, whether they are in the firm or in a broader business ecosystem.
Companies are taking advantage of more-standardised business process platform technologies, and most easy automation objectives have been hit.

Email is now a universal tool. And most organisations are already investing in collaboration support, via document sharing.

Social networking is not an environment in which IT professionals that implement a technology can sit back and assume that they have done their job. IT organisations will also need employees ­ in-house or outsourced ­ who understand interpersonal relationships, consensus building and methods for constructing communities.

Social interactions can be improved by using IT paraphernalia, such as storage, networks, displays, processors and software.

Such equipment can enable or enhance how people find each other and work together in any context.

MySpace is an extreme example of a collection of social interactions facilitated by IT, being a social network about people and not IT.

But unlike predecessor internet communities that were tightly bounded by a particular interest or point of view, MySpace and other social sites such as Facebook are open and unconstrained.

The emergence of tools that enhance social interactions parallels other revolutionary changes in the nature of work itself, much of which is driven by the emergence of IT and the internet.

A transformation is occurring in how people work. While older IT disciplines, such as text mining and information management, can be of great value, IT has become a broadly accepted and virtually ubiquitous presence.

Most professional IT practitioners, of course, do not think about MySpace or other social environments in the context of their enterprise IT strategies, except to block user access to web sites.

But failure to consider the impact of social networking on the performance of the organisation is a big mistake.

IT organisations should identify sources of expertise on social interactions, and ensure that those resources are involved in the planning and execution of a social facilitation strategy.

A smart implementation can have a dramatically positive impact on performance and will be the next stage in the technology-enabled, changing nature of work.

Tom Austin is a vice president and fellow at analyst Gartner