2013 #SocBiz Prediction: „Focus on implementing Social“ | Constellation Research

It is end of 2012 and of course all the experts are now publishing their predictions for 2013. For Alan Lepofsky 2013 is the year, where Social Business becomes real:

For customers, 2013 will be a year of taking action. Over the last few years organizations have invested a great deal of resources into learning about the technological and cultural shifts required for social business transformation. Now they can move past the struggles explaining „Facebook for the Enterprise“ and instead focus on implementing the social features that will help their employees get their jobs done.

For product vendors, 2013 will be less about creating shinny new features and more about helping their customers (and prospects) derive real business value from their platforms. Yes, of course there will still be innovations in user experience, mobile access, analytics and many more, but for the next little while the „competitive feature wars“ will be less important than proving they understand how to help organizations succeed.

via Social Business 2013: Less Talking. More Doing. | Constellation Research Inc..

So these vendors should best positioned, who have a Social Business Agenda, a methodology, experience, resources and partners, who know how to make Social Business real.

But although features seem not to be the most important differentiator, Alan as Technology Consultant of course needs to make some statements on Technology Trends: Social Task Management features will become more mainstream in social business platforms. Heard about Activities in IBM Connections? Read more about the unsung hero here and in German language here. We are used to Feed Readers and News Aggregators like Google Reader that pull all the updates into a single inbox making it easier to keep up to date. Are Activity Streams the new Reader – with offering on top an embedded experience, that allows in-place editing? „Elearning makes a comeback as social learning.„ And we will put the webcam more and more to work (although I don’t like this in my home office …).