Agent Of Change, the future of technology disruption in business, Economist Intelligence Unit

Tom Standage is the digital editor of The Economist and the author of several books on the history of technology. He is currently working on a new book on the history of the idea of social media, from Roman times to the Internet.
Q: What technology do you think will have the biggest impact on business in the coming decade?
Standage: The really big one is the impact of social networking on the enterprise. This has been entirely a consumer phenomenon, but we’re now seeing start-ups like Yammer and Chatter. They are taking the benefits and the approach of social media and applying them in companies. I think that’s going to be a very big change.
Q: Why will social networks be so important for companies?
Standage: People who are entering the workforce now think that this is how software works. Some managers talk about Facebook and other [social] networks as being time wasters, but in fact the opposite is true. This is the way that software is increasingly going to look, and that will impact on the way companies are run, because when you have a general discussion about things on a Facebook “wall”, you tend to get much less email and much less wasted time.
It also becomes much easier to find experts on particular subjects, to expose expertise within your company. Very often people turn out to be very good at something even though it’s not part of their job description. When you ask a general question, such as “Does anyone know if we’ve ever done a contract on this?”, the people who reply basically self- organise. You can see who the useful people are, and people within the company start to be perceived according to their willingnessto co-operate and their utility to others. That matters much more than what their job description is.
Q: What about outside the company?
Standage: The missing link is the use of social media
by companies to deal with their suppliers 
and customers. This will take a while, but 
the opportunity for people to engage with their suppliers and their customers in this way will be enormous. You can imagine how companies will be able to collaborate much more effectively. We’ve seen a few small examples of specific collaboration spaces—for a particular project, for instance—whose participants come from all sorts of different companies. We will start to see more of this type of thing. I agree that the world of business will be radically reshaped by the impact of work media: social network-based communication tools for the enterprise. But I wish Standage was backing that up with something more substantial than new entrants to the workforce wanting to use something like Facebook, or finding experts.
That’s why I think it is important to look at cognitive science, and make the case for using software that works the way our minds work. Or the tangible benefits of working out loud.