The most fascinating thing that I like about the social technology solutions is the never-ending possibilities of surprises. These surprises are the innovation brewing in all garage office across the globe with countless hours being spent to discover the next 'facebook' or 'twitter' that can change the history of mankind. Reality is that probably one out of millions of the ideas running over decades becomes earth shattering but bigger reality that I tend to believe is that in the process of finding that one earth shattering idea, there are many of them that are brought to life an unbelievable portfolio of experiments, I mean real-life experiments that slowly and progressively change the mindsets and thinking of the billions of people across the globe. You and me may not even know about all such possible cases that are happening around us but these micro change agents are continuously working to bring a new tomorrow that many of us wouldn't have thought about. That's precisely the point that I want to debate about when it comes to social CRM or social commerce is considered.
Most of the enterprises strategies are aligned to achieve certain end-state that defines the stated scenario of the enterprise when end-state is accomplished. For example, all along so many years in last decade, there had been an advocated (almost) end-state of the SOA enabled enterprise. Details of technological implementations may vary, specific organizational requirements may vary but still, at large there is some understanding and expectations of the end-state of the enterprise against which most of the enterprises attempted SOA initiatives. Further, take cloud computing, more recent phenomenon. While most of will agree that no one really can predictably say where this whole cloud computing is going to go in long term but based on current vision, there is fair degree of anticipation the end-state configurations of the enterprise as cloud becomes mainstream. This is the end-state against which enterprises are and can be advised for their strategies.
So debate is about whether we believe that there is any ideal end-state against which long terms strategies of social business is possible. As far as today's scenario is concerned, I say NO...and here is why I say that.
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