The killer application — the capability that makes a technology irresistible in the enterprise — for the PC was VisiCalc, the original spreadsheet. The killer application for networking is email, which has become mission-critical in many companies. The killer application for the Worldwide Web is e-commerce. So, what’s the killer application for social networking and social media?

The Enterprise 2.0 conference just wrapped up in Boston. Some big vendors — IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Novell — were there, along with a slew of small players and start-ups. The conference reeked of unrestrained enthusiasm for social networking in the enterprise.

Declared Tony Zingale, CEO of Jive: “Social business is the most important new enterprise software category in a decade. The innovation of social in the consumer space has had a ripple effect in the enterprise, forcing mass adoption of social business practices.” And what exactly is this killer app? It’s not that the various speakers didn’t offer an answer; each just had a different answer.

The market for social networking for business is nascent at best. One figure tossed around at the conference, a $5 billion market by 2013, seems paltry by enterprise IT standards. Even midsize technology vendors do better than that.

A few speakers resisted proclaiming a killer app. At this stage, one advised using social networking to augment existing business processes, not replace them.

Others noted, probably correctly, that business managers need to watch what is happening with consumer technology for their cues. One need only look as far as Apple (iPhone, iPad) and Research in Motion (Blackberry) to see that.

Still, out of the cacophony of overlapping sessions likely candidates for the killer app of social networking for business began to emerge. It took the form of this mantra: connect, communicate, collaborate. The business benefit: the ability to collapse time and speed process cycles.

None of these, of course, are new. Early in my career I was writing white papers trying to explain the value of Lotus Notes. Notes then was a group collaboration tool that expedited messaging and facilitated document-sharing. Many business managers didn’t get it then and still don’t.

Similarly, my book on knowledge management came out in 1998. I spent much of the book discussing strategies for managers to use to cajole, bribe, or threaten workers who resisted sharing information. Today, managers are likely to have the opposite complaint: workers who too readily share information on Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social networking forums.

If social networking is to ever have value to the finance organization it will be through its ability to facilitate collaboration. Finance has two big collaborative processes: the budget and the monthly (quarterly, yearly) closing and reconciliation. If a social networking tool could help you shave hours, days, even weeks off either or both of those processes and improve the final result, would you be interested? ###