Oracle Magazine - May/June 2011

involve lots of training, wasn’t complex, and was effective,” says Wheelhouse. “What’s good about Oracle WebCenter is its flexibility and its ability to let us create a compelling, intuitive user interface for our solution.”

But Balfour Beatty’s Enterprise 2.0 solution isn’t just about social connections and business processes. It’s also an effective way to reduce costs and increase productivity.

“Social media portals are a great way of communicating group and divisional initiatives and news, and Enterprise 2.0 capabilities are a great way of filtering all that information,” says Wheelhouse. “There are a lot of ways in which social media can make communications a lot more targeted and enable us to share technical expertise and innovation.”

THE DAWN OF THE SOCIAL ENTERPRISE

When it comes to portals and connecting with customers, the future doesn’t look like the past.

“It’s a very different landscape than it was just a couple years ago,” says Current Analysis’ Shimmin.

And although many things will change in the technology land-
scape over the next few years, one thing is certain: most companies

will integrate social networking and social computing capabilities into their enterprise IT strategy.

“In the last two years, we’ve seen the reshaping of portals to be much more capable, much more social, and much more collaborative environments for serving enterprise I T,” says Shimmin. “They’re no longer simply a space where you have pull-down menus to access HR documents. They still do that, but now they also have integrated, collaborative, social networking functions that allow companies to develop stronger customer relationships, optimize employee interactions, and gain greater insight into market trends.” T

David A. Kelly (davidakelly.com) is a business, technology, and travel
writer who lives in West Newton, Massachusetts.

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