Business use of social networks, also referred to as social media or just plain social business, refers to the use of the Internet in myriad forms to interact with the organization’s various stakeholders. These typically are employees, suppliers, partners, or customers.

IBM describes a social business as one that “embraces networks of people to create business value.” It involves sharing, transparency, innovation, and two-way interaction. The objective is improved communications and collaboration that should lead to higher productivity, improved products and services, better decision making, and ultimately greater revenue, market share, and profits. Social business is a key component of IBM’s 2011 Tech Trends Report, here.

A recent University of Massachusetts survey, here, on Fortune 500 companies found that they already were engaged in social networking: 23% had an active public-facing corporate blog, 62% had active corporate Twitter accounts, and 58% had Facebook pages. In addition, companies have been deploying social networking tools like Yammer or IBM Connections in house. All this social networking raises the question: What’s the ROI? more

A 2011 IBM study noted that 55% of business managers were embracing to speed business transformation. They were just a few steps behind CIOs, 60% of whom in the same study planned to use cloud computing.

Another 2011 IBM study of midmarket trends, here, listed the primary benefits midsize businesses are gaining through cloud adoption. These include cost savings, ease of management, redundancy, uptime, rapid provisioning, flexible pricing, and more.

Getting to the cloud, particularly a private cloud, has proven to be a challenge. Starting with virtualization as the foundation, IBM now lays out a simple progression companies can follow through basic to advanced cloud capabilities. more

Companies would pay even less attention to disaster recovery than they do now if auditors and other compliance police didn’t get on their cases or threaten them with fines or liability of various sorts. Disaster recovery (DR) alone, however, may not be sufficient.

Based on its 2011 Global Business Resilience and Risk Study IBM is suggesting a more proactive and forward thinking approach to DR, one that encompasses opportunities as well as risks. The study is available here.

Among the findings of the study: organizations are diversifying their strategies to build business resilience, while keeping continuity, IT, and compliance risks in the forefront. And increasingly in business resilience strategies cloud computing is quickly emerging as a key risk and opportunity management tool. more

The financial services industry is a huge user of information technology, but it has been much slower to jump on the cloud bandwagon. Most of its cloud interest, rather, has revolved around virtualization and private clouds. wiredFINANCE addressed private clouds some months back here.

At a recent gathering of financial services executives in Boston the topic turned to cloud computing. Information Week reporter Charles Babcock was there and captured the mood of the gathering, pulling what he considered five cloud lessons, the problematic word here is lesson.

Kevin Jackson, writing for Forbes, focused on eight cloud mistakes here. Check out what the financial industry folks advise about cloud computing here. more

Every CFO has experienced dueling spreadsheets. Rival business advocates present compelling spreadsheets. The arguments are clear and persuasive, backed by an impressive array of quantitative data.

On closer inspection, however, the dueling spreadsheets reveal disturbing inconsistencies in the data. Overall 3Q sales for Region 2 are significantly different; customer data in one points in a different direction than the other. Even data about the company’s products are different. How can that be?

Enterprises struggle to gain a consistent, shareable and accurate single version of data across their enterprises—a single version of the truth—according to Gartner’s latest Magic Quadrants for Master Data Management. Yet, achieving and maintaining a single, semantically consistent version of master data is a critical capability that supports many business drivers, from sales to compliance. more