Many organizations today still struggle with isolated knowledge workers, a limited understanding of organizational expertise and a lack of adhered to best practices. Information barriers hamper productivity, decrease employee awareness and cripple the pace of innovation with duplicated efforts and wasted time.

This is where online social software holds huge potential, both inside and outside the organization. Adopting and implementing social software for business is not a new concept. In fact, we've all been networking for decades-long before anyone ever heard of Facebook or Linked-In.

Every business today is based on building relationships. The quality and impact of your work and the profitability of your business depends upon relationships - with customers, co-workers, and competitors; with suppliers, distributors, and support services; with direct reports, senior managers and boards.

From the telephone conversations we have with our customers to the face to face meetings we have in the conference room to the business conversations we have in the hallway and after work. These are all early forms of social networking in the workplace that are still being used today.

With over 90 billion emails being sent daily, email is clearly the number one social networking tool being used today. It's an ineffectual tool. According to Gartner survey, the average knowledge worker wastes 20% of their day responding, managing and organizing their email.

Our dependency on email as a primary communications and team collaboration tool for business is highly problematic.

Why can't we use the cool and easy to use tools we have at home in the office?

Many companies are now starting to adopt social software tools in an effort to improve morale, increase business productivity and gain competitive advantage.

But consumer social tools and business social tools are quite different ¾ night and day. Business owners need powerful and integrated solutions that offer web content management, collaboration and social networking tools in a single package. Corporate solutions also have to be secure, extensible and customizable, with support for Open API's, single sign-on and robust monitoring and measurement tools.

Business users also need browser, email, desktop and mobility support for all of their social software applications that are used in the office - to support the multiple ways that employees work. Social software solutions, in other words, need to support the way people work - and the way corporations work - including adhering to corporate policies, procedures and guidelines.