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Indiana University has saved nearly $20 million by joining with other universities to reduce administrative costs for essential financial software systems. The Kuali Financial System is open source software that was created to fit the needs of colleges and universities. By definition, open source software is free to use, distribute and modify, meaning IU avoids the costs of licensing expensive commercial systems that often cost tens of millions of dollars to buy and install. IU fully implemented and transitioned to the Kuali System in February.

Although it's difficult to predict what the future Internet will look like, it's probably safe to say that certain trends we've seen during the past decade will continue. This means that the Internet will become further integrated into our daily lives, becoming more ubiquitous, available, autonomous, and mobile. The engineers who are guiding the Internet in this direction are doing so by developing mobile agents, which are pieces of software that can autonomously migrate from one computer to another and interact with each other.

Social software helped TEVA Pharmaceuticals shrink its manufacturing cycle time by 40% between January and April -- when the company's Oracle ERP apps couldn't keep up with unpredictable market conditions.

The adoption of social software by organizations started with the tools, and has moved to focus on the purpose for the tools. The last piece of the puzzle with be the people: their skills with the technologies and the ways that those skills affect their relationships with each other.

Gartner's predictions include a very interesting statement, that "by 2013, 15% of BI deployments will combine BI, collaboration and social software into decision-making environments." What this means is that social media is starting to be integrated tightly with hard-core business intelligence functions in support of decision making. 

At EMC, instead of starting long e-mail threads, employees can check updates about a project on a Jive page, search for relevant materials, and download the files as they need them. Sales representatives looking for insight about a competitor can query the "competitive community" on EMC's internal social network and get an answer as they walk to a client meeting, Pappas says. The company also now uses Jive's tools externally, to augment user-support forums and to create community or "affinity" pages for clients that use EMC software.

I have always believed that collaboration is most meaningful when you are really creating something together and when you are sharing your thoughts before they are finished products. If I am only willing to show you something that is a polished document, you might edit or change it a little, but you are not really doing it with me. People have to trust each other to do that. It is risky to show people your unfinished thoughts. Technologies for a long time could let you do that; people did not always do that. Social software, to the extent that it is helping people build trust and be comfortable with more casual, lightweight communications, could make it possible for more of our attempts at collaboration to be real collaboration.

"In a move to boost sales through social recommendations, online shoe and clothing retailer Zappos, which is owned by Amazon, has added a new feature called "PinPointing" that offers recommendations based on Pinterest accounts. Unfortunately, the feature doesn't work very well yet."

When it comes to basic computer applications, even members of the millennial generation may not know as much as they think they do. A study by North Carolina Central University found that most students overestimated their skill levels when they were asked how they perceived their ability to complete certain tasks and then tested on those tasks. Researchers surveyed 171 undergraduates, the majority of whom believed they had either an average or high skill level in Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The students were then tested on three different skill levels - basic, moderate, and advanced - in each of those applications. Students correctly perceived their skill level only in PowerPoint, the study said, with 81 percent of students who thought they had at least an average skill level actually performing that way.