DUNDU – THE PHILOSOPHY THAT CHANGES A GROUP

On the Lotusphere 2011 in Orlando, IBM presented the new strategy for the Lotus Collaboration Software: Get Social, Do Business. Social Business is the introduction of new Web 2.0 collaboration tools in order to revolutionize the way a company works (IBM, 2011). Especially, the social platform category is an emerging market and is predicted to grow at an annual rate of nearly 40% according to a recent IDC white paper (Traudt and Vancil, 2011). Despite this huge growth potential, a deeper look reveals that the success factors for Social Business and its major goal to transform the company into a more collaborative “Enterprise 2.0” go beyond mere implementation (Pitt, 2011). IDC sees social software as “an enabler to the cultural shift and business process changes that need to take place in order to transform a company into a Social Business.” (Traudt and Vancil, 2011, p.1). But that also means, in consequence, that the success of the implementation mainly depends on the accomplishment of this cultural shift. It is critical for a social business that the employees start to rethink their patterns of their level of collaboration and communication (Pitt, 2011). Effective communication and collaboration still starts on the personal level, one level below this technological platform, and this will be the critical success factor (Richter, 2010). The employees have to live the change and as early adapters lead by example. The goal of the paper is to introduce a new concept to communicate and implement Social Software more efficiently in a creative and easy way and to evaluate the results. As stated in the introduction, the level of interaction of the people matters most, and it is not so much about the technology that just indicates where the collaboration takes place (Richter, 2010).