Last week, I was privileged to meet with Geoffrey Moore, world-renowned business consultant and author, to discuss the future of social business software and applications. I was joined by Dave Hersh, CEO of Jive Software, and Eugene Lee, CEO of Socialtext – comrades in the war against process-driven enterprise irrationality ☺. Much of what follows came out of this very insightful meeting.

In the grand scheme of things, the 1990s were the golden era of enterprise IT. Fueled by an insatiable desire to drive efficiencies by leveraging powerful, low cost computing systems — and accelerated by fears of a Y2K-driven collapse of existing systems — companies automated and re-engineered their business processes like never before or since. For the enterprise IT industry, it was an era of unprecedented growth. Since that time, consumer IT has emerged as the dominant sector in the IT industry as nearly every human on the planet has plugged into the cloud and become part of the technology infrastructure.

As information technology has transformed both enterprises and the customers they serve, companies have greatly reduced resources by eliminating layer upon later of middle management. The middle managers who remain are under tremendous pressure. They face the daily task of making quick judgment calls and course corrections, yet they rarely have the time or resources required to make sure they are making the right decisions. This problem has only grown worse as executive management has continued to push decision making lower in the organization, right onto the virtual desks of middle management.

Social Business Applications to the Rescue

Addressing this urgent need in organizations — helping middle management make sound judgments faster — is where social business applications really shine. When developed and deployed with specific business requirements in mind, these applications can greatly improve the speed and agility of people performing a wide variety of decision making tasks, especially those decisions benefiting from the collaboration of a lot of people, particularly customers.