Social Business Capabilities and Metrics This presentation will focus on the need to identify a core set of capabilities that have emerged from the “social” explosion on the web (blogging, social networking, social media) that can be successfully applied in business solutions. Businesses not only want to know that the technical community is producing standards that when implemented, meet their needs, but also want to know that these standards work in harmony to repeatedly fulfill the use cases most beneficial to social technologies used in the work place. The identification of common use cases that align with the emerging social capabilities are needed to ensure adoption can occur. Furthermore, use cases supported by social capabilities can benefit from a deployment approach that enables business agility, like cloud, while conforming to IT standards. As social technologies becomes a fundamental component of business applications and are leveraged for communication inside and outside the enterprise, there is an increasing need to discuss business use cases in order to align the various social standards with the demands of social computing in the enterprise space. Use cases must leverage capabilities of the underlying social technologies and to the greatest extent possible, and should be agnostic to any underlying configuration, although in some cases, it may be important for the use case architecture to call out a specific mobile, cloud or desktop scenario. Furthermore it is imperative to establish some way to measure the outcomes of the use of the social capabilities in the context of the use case. Without key performance indicators or measurement metrics a return on investment can not be quantified. Focus of the presentiation will be placed on the need to identify core social capabilities, in support of the use cases, and how these can be deployed in an IT environment leveraging private, public and or hybrid cloud deployment models. We will also discuss best practices in areas related to the maturity of social capabilities,business use cases and measurement models, with the understanding that there can be a wide range of successful practices depending on the scenario or technology.