Theres a new term doing the rounds in the IT vendor market - social collaboration. Nobody gave me an exact meaning to that, either the IT vendors or the sociologists/anthropologists/sociobiologists. Wikipedia too is pretty cryptic and unclear about it. So much for social collaboration being helpful in defining social collaboration! And I am loath to decipher the hidden insinuations of that taxonomy in the IT space. Almost like doing taxidermy to myself.

Collaboration by definition means working together towards a common goal:

Collaboration is a recursive process where two or more people or organizations work together in an intersection of common goals — for example, an intellectual endeavor that is creative in nature—by sharing knowledge, learning and building consensus.

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Theres been an interesting discussion happening in many disjointed places today around culture & strategy in terms of Social CRM or Social Business or whatever is your favorite poison. It all started for me in the #SCRMSummit twitter hashtag discussions associated with the BPT Partners' SCRM certification summit that happened on 21st & 22nd March in Madrid, Spain.

Somebody said culture eats strategy for lunch and that to successfully implement social CRM the organization's culture needs to change. And then I got this interesting definition for culture: "What happens in an organisation when no one is looking" from Debabrat Mishra on twitter.

A few minutes back I got another nice definition from this HBS blog post titled "Culture trumps strategy, every time...

I have tried to capture some of my top of mind thoughts around the new hyperbole around Social BPM. But before I delve further, let us try & de-construct the term "social" a bit before we get into the crux of the problem here. The dictionary meaning of "Social" itself is myriad and can be used in multiple contexts and connotations.

But the recent hype around "social xyz" is in one of two respects - either Marketing/PR induced hallucinations around integration with social media or the new incumbents & startups in the enterprise software space trying to make a living amongst the established enterprise software biggies by harping on one of the most hyped out terms.

Social CRM purists would like to clarify, that in spite of the hyperbole from the marketing/PR agencies, its not limited to only the social media/networks aspect but a lot of other stuff too. A post is not enough to explain...

As I prepare myself for the long haul flight from BLR to SFO via DXB tonight & procrastinate on the packing I am catching up on a few 'news' articles rather than 'blog' posts on Social CRM from my usual firehose consisting of RSS feeds of known sources, twitter mentions & google alerts. As I keep reading them I cannot help going back to my own interactions with various VPs from Fortune 500 companies around the globe w.r.t. "using social media for their business" and correlating what I am reading from the firehose.

The biggest news is that Gartner predicts that Social CRM will be a $1 billion market by 2013. IIRC, thats a revision of their earlier stand of the market achieving that size by 2011. Can't be sure, drinking a lot from the digital firehose can make you delusional.

OTOH the zeitgeist of the blogosphere is asking existential questions about the 'Social CRM'...