We’ve spent a lot of time in this blog listing the business benefits that can be achieved in the cloud. Today I’d like to write about harnessing the growing use and power of enterprise social networking through the cloud.

Increasing efficiency, productivity and innovation in a time of economic uncertainty has certainly challenged commercial and government leaders to rely more than ever on developing and sustaining collaborative enterprises. In the July-August 2011 issue of Harvard Business Review, researchers shared four success factors required to achieve collaboration success:

• Defining and building a shared purpose
• Cultivating an ethic of contribution
• Developing processes that enable people to work together in flexible but disciplined projects
• Creating an infrastructure in which collaboration is valued and rewarded

For this last point, cloud computing offers a mechanism to quickly access the type of infrastructure required for success. Through SaaS and IaaS solutions and models, commercial and government organizations can ramp-up quickly with minimal upfront investment. At CGI, we know this from experience. We launched a social networking platform in October and were able to deploy the solution to all employees in a matter of days—which allowed us to immediately benefit from widespread sharing and multi-person dialogue.

If you’re looking into adopting a social business within your organization, be certain that the cloud provider takes into consideration the important change management aspects to enable success. For instance, CGI has built an enterprise social networking solution – CGI SocialBusiness360™ for commercial organizations and CGI SocialGovernment360™ for government – that incorporates strategy, adoption and integration services with its cloud offerings to enable the required holistic solution.

Social networking has transformed the way we communicate in our personal lives, allowing us to connect as never before. I look forward to watching how these social networking techniques and cloud technologies help transform the way we communicate in our business lives as well.