McKinsey Report on Social Technologies and Organisations

In the last week McKinsey have released a report on the ways that organisations are using social technologies to change and extend their business.

The report is available here.

Bear in mind that you'll need to register (for free) to access the content.

The report shows that of the 4,261 respondants to their survey, 40% indicated that they were using social networking for "scanning the external environment ". Social networking was found to be effective at allowing members of networked organisations access external experts. Furthermore 36% indicated that social networking helped them with "finding new ideas".

These are very interesting findings for any school interested in using social networking. Technology obviously has great potential to enable teachers to access experts external to their school. Social networking could be used to make it possible for teachers to get new ideas from other professionals. The McKinsey Report makes it clear that many commercial and other organisations are using social networking in exactly this way.