JP Rangaswami on Sharing Acitivity in Businesses

Who owns this data? That’s a key question in a data-driven world.

However,
within a company, drawing together shouldn’t be complicated – there’s
no rocket science in Facebook, for example. It’s built of pre-existing
elements whose technological basis is well-known.

The first
step is to think about the company directory. “I’ve never worked in a
company that didn’t have a director,” he said. “Groupings have existed
since the year dot.” company directories have gone from being
hand-created to electronically created, and can become living tools,
with the right amount of metadata…

At the basis of the idea of
using social tools in the enterprise is the notion that communication
can be captured as a persistent archive, tagged with rich metadata and
manipulated.

“If we make everything we say a data object, and we can share and move it around,” he says. “It becomes valuable.”

So,
if I understood what JP was saying, imagine taking the sort of data you
get in your Facebook newsfeed, and seeing it for work – the meetings
people are arranging, the conversations they’re having the places
you’re going. “Embedding that into my workflow is what makes it
valuable,”

(Confession:
I missed the first 15 minutes of this session, so I’ve used material
from tweets by Nancy, Ronna and Steph to reconstruct some of what I
missed)