Business Technology Roundtable

The demand for substantive customer feedback -- and engaging all constituents into the feedback process -- drives the need for businesses to innovate and also manage innovation in a new way. Results from a recent market study show that this inherent need is also creating the opportunity for social technologies to help support and add value to the commercial innovation process. The fourth annual "Social Business Survey" from International Data Corporation ( IDC ) revealed a significant departure from previous years -- in terms of focus and use cases for social business technology. With the maturing of social media tools within the enterprise -- and their adoption as an engagement channel -- use cases have grown into some broad categories, such as customer experience, sales enablement, digital commerce, enterprise social network (ESN), innovation management, and socialytics. IDC says that as users request solutions to extend outside the firewall, the 2012 survey demons...

A significant new analysis of the economic potential of video, data and voice systems that work together over the Internet -- known collectively as Unified Communications (UC) -- demonstrates that when these collaboration technologies are interoperable, they deliver clear commercial and consumer benefits. The paper, written by Dr. Michael Katz and Dr. Bryan Keating studies the current unified communications market. The Katz/Keating study outlines the potential negative outcomes for the market of some UC vendors refuse to adopt industry standards that would enable video-to-video calls between different systems. "The economic effects of incompatibility are not an abstract academic theory," Katz said. "There are real, everyday consequences to economic growth, consumer well-being and business productivity when one company has a proprietary Internet video system that does not work with others. This means less jobs will be created and people and businesses wil...