The Tech Side of #SocBiz - What Do You Need to Know?

OK, so you've read the analyst reports, scanned the press releases, dug into the latest IBM study ("The Business of Social Business", from Eric Lesser and IBM's Institute for Business Value)...and Social Business is shaping up to be a big part of your company's strategic plan.

That's all well and good, but we're techies; our concerns are often (if not usually) more tactical and immediate than those seen in analyst reports, press releases and research studies.  We're the nuts-and-bolts folks, so we want to know what will be expected of us, so that we can take stock of our knowledge and improve upon it where necessary.  It's a question that deals with more than just installation and configuration; we may need to open up to "big picture" thinking in ways the typical (if you'll pardon the term) "paradigm shift" does not require.

So, the question is simple - what do you need to know and understand to make your transition to Social Business easier?  Hopefully, this blog can start providing answers.  In the weeks to come, you'll be seeing a series of articles titled "The Tech Side of #SocBiz", in which I'll explore what IBM products, capabilities and/or technologies can add information and skills to your arsenal.  Some (as you'll see this weekend, in the very first article) will be free tools that you can use to build your chops without a significant investment in hardware or software; others will be capabilities that already exist within the various products, but go unnoticed and unused by many admins.  We'll talk about the entire process, from planning to deployment to troubleshooting and maintenance.

I'll tell you this much right now - I do NOT have a particular agenda, and I don't have a long list of topics ready to go.  My goal here is to identify what you need, go find the resources that can help you, and bring them back to this blog.  To that end, PLEASE take the time to drop a comment on this article (or any others in the series) to let me know what aspects of "The Tech Side of #SocBiz" you want (or need) to explore further.

Hang on - this will probably be a wild ride.