This article was first posted by Neil Pound at JNet Forums

“Don’t dither or fret. Um and ah. Don’t pass the buck. This is it”. Characteristically plain speaking from Eric Pickles – the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government – as he exhorted Local Government¹ to “show leadership, stop throwing money away, and get coordinated”. The specific context was problem families but the thrust of his attack applies equally to the delivery of any number of public sector services that call for collaboration between organisations. The government’s cloud computing initiative – the G-Cloud – can radically change the nature of collaboration but I suspect getting the technology right is only half the battle.

To many, Formula 1 racing is about driving skill and mechanical excellence, but the elements that make the sport exciting are now only the by-product of the real battle: data and strategy. During every multi-million pound race weekend, advanced algorithms plot the likely result of every move on the track, basing their calculations on the telemetry sent by each individual team’s cars, as well as real world observations of what the opposition are doing.

In a global economy predisposed to doom and gloom, it's well-known that the digital industry has flown in the face of wider trends; 10 years of growth are hard to argue with as an indicator of success.

When Propel London set up shop in 2001 digital had just launched on that trajectory.  It's not nostalgia: things really were simpler back then - there were fewer technologies, platforms, gadgets, websites, metrics, routes to audience, methodologies...  As recruiters our main focus was on web design-and-build vacancies.  For that brief time those disciplines were the mainstay of new media.

To the end-user, the telephone is a simple proposition. For at least the last few decades, a caller in Arbroath could pick up the phone and direct dial a friend in Cincinnati. Within a few seconds, they’d be talking. It didn’t matter that one was connected to BT and one to AT&T; it didn’t matter that their words were transmitted under the Atlantic or over the skies; it just worked. The onus was entirely on the providers to make it happen. Yet, in the online world, both social media itself, and businesses seeking to cash in on free customer data and interaction, are expecting the customer to do all the pushing.

Rich Page, author of Website Optimisation: An Hour a Day from Adobe argues that the emphasis of spend needs to shift for acquisition to conversion for digital success.

A recent report by Forrester found that for every $80 spent on driving traffic to a site, $1 was spent on conversion. This has the effect of continually throwing more into the bucket will little or no effect on output.

With online engagement becoming the life blood of any organisation simple methods can create big success not just in retail but also in B2B engagement.

In this session we catch up with Paul Devlin from Microstrategy about dealing with the complexity and volumes of data.

He discusses the concept of social commerce. Paul tells us that our social advocates are our best customers however new data chains are needed to make these connections.

The fundamental impact of how social media is changing commerce cannot be underestimated, he cites examples of companies whose dated business models now mean they are struggling to keep up in the digital economy.

Richard talks about the trend towards inherently social businesses which are using social technologies to create better connections internally and how this is the first step to becoming a social business.

This way of communicating makes an incredibly rich seam of data available that in the past was locked-up in silos of email traffic between discreet groups of actors. He argues that in hindsight, social networks are the way we would have designed email.

On the consumerisation of IT, Richard argues that the drive is purely out of frustration to get the work done and that open platforms will help to make organisations more efficient, driving better workflows and information sharing.