Gia Lyons, who spent a while at IBM trying to show companies what’s possible with social software, now works for Jive. While checking out her blogged new employee interview, I found this especially insightful:

Customers are willing to go with pure play and niche vendors for social software because they recognize that a fresh approach is needed here. The folks who wrote your email and shared file applications approach social software through 15 years of “business as usual” thinking.

As someone who tries to convince clients that social software from vendors they never heard of can be more successful then something built by the same people who sold them their ERP or ECM systems, this is heartening. When it comes to Enterprise 2.0, firms like Jive are agile in a way Big IT can’t be, or at least is not yet willing to be. Building good social software involves an element of discarding the past - it’s easier for the firms with a very limited one.