Two articles came across my desk recently that were not related, but read as if they could have been written as companion pieces under one headline. The first looked at how social networks — and the people who use them in particular — can transform the way we work; the other examined the growing focus on strong people skills in IT.

Nowadays, it’s “more about what gets done than about what you know,” Schaffner writes.

The two pieces together illuminate the shift that’s happening in IT. Help desks are replacing rudeness with customer care, and beginning to see their role as enabling employees to be more productive, rather than fixing computers that have caught fire. This new focus on soft skills goes hand in hand with discovering different, more effective ways of collaborating.

In the first article, which ran in a recent issue of Fortune magazine, Cisco VP of enterprise Alan Cohen discusses how work has changed, from “local to global, from centralized to decentralized.” He mentions the significant investment in transaction systems, including ERP and e-mail, in the past decade to reduce business costs and redundancy. But those systems have had their run, and now it’s time for innovation and productivity to come from people themselves. Read more…

Jenny Sweeney Customer Service, Social Media Alan Cohen, Cisco, Forbes, Fortune, Mike Schaffner