I have a new email address, one that allows me access to an enterprise social network, run off the “Yammer” platform that has been deployed by an occasional client.

This is an innovation that will turn the time people spend on their social networks into hugely productive time for employers.

The client concerned has a far flung empire, not big, but very spread, delivering a specialised service. Last week they urgently needed someone with an unusual skill to address a crisis in a client factory, a skill that up to now may have taken weeks to identify, if it was around. Instead, the engineering manager stuck the request on their yammer network, and it took minutes for a young engineer in Perth to respond, he had skill required, developed with a previous employer.

The opportunity to use internal social media, Yammer, Chatter, the Salesforce.com equivalent, and others,  is opening a door to collaborative work such that we have brely dreamed about before. Forget the complicated, time consuming, and mostly wasted project update meetings every second day, replace it with a daily SM update, create forums to address problems and spread news and ideas.

This is not just socialising business, this is a revolution in cross functional/geographic collaborative management.

That’ll scare some folks!