Context Defines Capability

Curse you GigaOm!  Once again, some thoughts that I have been noodling over re: Social Interaction in the Enterprise have been already put together by someone else!

Anyhow, read this article.  In case you don't feel like reading it, it can be summarized as follows: 

1. The ridiculous growth in information collected by organizations
2. The increasing inability of "traditional" systems to deal with this data ("traditional" =:= Client/Server, Monolithic applications, and Application silos)
3. The necessity of "centralization" of data and content in the Cloud, instead of in a specific vendor's on-premise application silo (think SAP, Oracle, etc.)
4. The accessibility of cloud content across multiple devices, and multiple behavior streams, in a manner not restricted by traditional boundaries.
5. The ability to leverage this access by using tailored applications (light and heavy, single-purpose and multi-purpose) across the entire organization
6. The dramatically increased productivity as people can focus on the results that the need to achieve, and not on the tools that they use to achieve these results

Or, to summarize the above summary (because you can never create a short enough summary!)

1. Organization's data/content are growing at a tremendous rate
2. This data will, increasingly, end up in the cloud
3. Organizations will - eventually - end up having more effective access to this data
4. They will work with this data with a multitude of applications (and end-points)
5. Productivity will increase
6. Profit!

Or, to summarize the above summary of the summary (see!  really short summary here!)

Context Defines Capability

To expand on that last line from the perspective of a Service Provider, the benefits of your service should be tailored to the end-point that is being used, as well as the context that it is being used in.  

Or, to put it differently, you can not, and should not force the user to change their behavior pattern to work with your service (unless there is a material improvement involved!).  Instead, your should insert yourself into the User's behavior stream, by providing different hooks, features and capabilities that can be naturally and intuitively used as part of the user's ongoing business processes.