<p>As we've watched digital networks reshape just about every aspect of business these days, I've found that we've struggled to come up with the right words and ways to describe a very different way of working. From vast app stores and pervasive streams of big data to enterprise social networks and customer engagement, the rules that Internet-based models of business impose are often very different.</p><p>Yet some well-known elements of business haven't necessarily changed and have only become more pronounced: For example, scale is one of the single biggest challenges in moving to digital and social business, but has also been a challenge in our globalized world for some time. Today's pervasive network connectedness is making this factor ever more pronounced. For organizations now this typically means having to maintain tens of thousands, or even millions, of simultaneous conversations with the marketplace for critical activities such as marketing, sales, and customer service. It also means most businesses will have to manage an order of magnitude more suppliers, business partners, and other 3rd party relationships (example: open APIs are a great harbinger of high scale in digital supply chains.)</p><p>Thus, the challenges of magnitude infuse everything in digital: Distribution, supply, engagement, control, competition, and even or perhaps especially security and sustainability. However, in other areas, especially where digital and social networks fundamentally change the fabric of things, we still don't have clearly identified constructs, or even good words that we can use.</p><p>For instance, it's been abundantly clear for a decade now that open digital communities are a new and revolutionary construct that have gone on to literally change the world. From upending media and software (social media and open source communities, respectively) to remaking the fundamental nature of how business in all industries gets done (collaborative economy), large, self-organizing communities are taking the lead. Digital technology even changes the underlying forces of the age-old concept of community. For example, even though the idea of community has been around since there have been people, the digital incarnation seemingly does something a bit different: Instead of forming insular walls that group people together, digital communities tends to group people together and break the walls down.</p><p><a href="http://www.enterpriseirregulars.com/71625/digital-business-ecologies-how-social-networks-and-communities-are-upending-our-organizations/">Keep reading...</a></p>