by Niall Cook from “Enterprise 2.0: how social software will change the future of work”, Gower, 2008

Communication: communication platforms are those that allow people to converse with others, either by text, image, voice or video, or a combination of these.

Cooperation: sharing software enables people to share content with others in structured and unstructured ways.

Collaboration: collaboration tools encourage people to collaborate with each other on particular problems, directly and indirectly in both central and distributed ways.

Connection: networking technologies make it possible for people to make connection with and between both content and other people.

There is clearly some overlap between these categories, most notably in the case of cooperation and collaboration. One can surmise that cooperation focuses on helping individuals work towards a common product where the knowledge gained from the process is not the goal, whereas collaboration is focused on the knowledge gained from the process of constructing something. Even so, both share the objective of enabling a group of individuals to produce something better than that which they could have produced alone.

In the context of social software, collaboration and connection require more formality than communications and cooperation, mainly because they depend on people to do things in a relatively structured manner. Likewise, connection and communication, because of the inherent focus on groups rather than individuals. These relationships can be visualized easily (see figure 1) and should be considered within the context of the appropriate corporate culture when prioritizing the introduction of different forms of social software into an organization.

Figure 1: The 4Cs formality/interaction matrix

For example, a company with predominantly formal organizational structures and a culture of group interaction will benefit most from social software that enables collaboration. Conversely, an organization with an informal structure and a culture that rewards individual effort may prefer to invest in social software to support communication. This framework can help any company decide where to focus their time and effor for most benefit, rather than being led by vendors trying to sell their blog/wiki/social networking solution without any understanding of the organizational structure or culture into which it will be introduced.

This approach can also be used to support organizational change. For example, if a company is trying to encourage a shift from individual effort to group problem solving, but within the confines of a relatively informal culture, then it should focus on cooperative social software that requires more interaction. Using this apporach, it is possible to identify the preferred social software footprint for any organization. The examples below show the social software footprints for three different organizations (see figure 2)

1. very informal, collaborative culture
2. very formal, highly collaborative culture
3. informal and formal, more focus on individual effort but some group problem solving.

Figure 2: The social software footprints for three types of organization

The next step is to overlay some of the specific tools and technologies currently available – and any more that might emerge in the future – onto this matrix in order to map them directly to organizational culture (see figure 3)

Figure 3: The 4Cs social software technology framework