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A guiding goal in much of my work is the democratization of the workplace. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models.

"In this on-going collaboration debate, too many people view collaboration as a solution to a problem. It is not. Collaboration is the behaviour that emerges in contexts that invite for collaboration."

"Last week, I presented a premise at the Enterprise 2.0 conference that because the costs of technology and human capital have flipped (relatively speaking), people are now the weakest link in organizational value chains."

"Our fifth annual survey on the way organizations use social tools and technologies finds that they continue to seep into many organizations, transforming business processes and raising performance."

"Over the weekend my friend and industry colleague JP Rangaswami wrote an insightful post that pondered how we have gone about delivering on customer experiences as connected to our back-end capabilities. Specifically, he explored an issue that is increasingly challenging many of the large-company CIOs I speak with these days: That the present rates of change demanded of the accumulation of 20-30 years of legacy business systems is greatly exceeding the ability of our enterprises and associated software "stacks" to deliver on them, particularly as cloud, social, and mobile dramatically transform computing today. "

The employees are a company's most valuable assets. So they say. But do they really understand what it means?

"This isn't a "shock & awe" title to merely draw you in. This also isn't a blanket claim from an "expert" who has never been in the trenches that "social business is dead". Enterprise 2.0 (aka social business) is not dead. Significant progress continues to be made. More and more enterprises have social business strategies and efforts for both marketing & internal collaboration. However, enterprises with several years of Enterprise 2.0 efforts under their belt have failed to reach the tipping point and cross into mainstream adoption of social collaboration . Coincidentally, Dion Hinchcliffe recently noted in The Path to Co-Creating a Social Business, the existence of the fissure with older collaborative channels on one side and the option to voluntarily engage socially on the other. I believe this is a sign post that we must pay attention to and make adjustments or social business could fall deeply into the rabbit hole where knowledge management (KM) efforts of past, already reside. "

The name we give to something influences the way we look at it. It creates another perspective on the same reality. In many cases, this can be very useful. However, perception alone does not create a different reality.

Last year I was asked what I thought about Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0). While it's a popular subject amongst some management theorists, there aren't many examples of E2.0 in practice. Peter Evans-Greenwood has a good analysis of why E2.0 is not ready for mainstream business implementation due to regulatory constraints.

A recent survey conducted by Proofpoint found that 8% of companies had terminated employees due to social media usage (common causes including sharing sensitive information on a network). And while the statistic seems significant, it only underscores one of several upcoming challenges nearly every organization will face as changes in people, process and technology fueled by the collective movement we call social media begin to transform business. Here are a few challenges that every organization should be planning for right now. If you aren't you will be.