In the first part of this post, I linked to a column that examined how social media is already starting to transform aspects of HR applications at the core, not at the periphery. I firmly believe that social media and social interaction can transform procurement as well, even though it faces a number of challenges in our neck of the universe relative to HR (the most important to overcome will be the generally less social, less interactive side of procurement and operations types relative to bubbly HR folks). But if we can overcome the initial hurdle of showing the power of social interaction within procurement, I have no doubt that social media capabilities will eventually catch hole permanently, and transform the collaboration capabilities of many of the applications we already work with going forward.

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We've lined up four sponsors already for the launch -- or shortly following the launch -- of Spend Matters UK & Europe, slated for next week (or early the following, barring any last minute software challenges). If you'd like to get in on the ground floor of the UK & Europe launch, which we are in the final stages of ironing out the technical and design site details on, time is running short. You can still get in touch with me or Peter Smith, (e-mail provided a the end of the post in the above link) who can tell you more about it. Our initial sponsorship pool is definitely weighted more heavily towards software than services, which is perhaps not surprising given the lack of the former's detailed coverage in the UK & Europe by other media, but we plan to look at all aspects of the procurement and supply chain ecosystem in our coverage.

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Reading this column by Bill Kutik about the convergence of social media with HR applications once again made me think about the possibilities of integrating greater social activity into the very core of the tools we use as procurement and supply chain professionals in our professional lives every day. Bill suggests in a recent round of briefings with these providers that he's enthusiastic about how these vendors appear to understand the importance of social media. To this end, they're "not just delivering a separate module to create an internal corporate Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter, but actually inserting networking capabilities into existing applications to make them smarter, better and faster."

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