I am proud to announce today that Headshift has joined Dachis Group to create the leading global social business design consulting firm.

When I first saw the news last April that Jeffrey Dachis had backing from Austin Ventures to create a new startup in this space, I was intrigued. With his track record of market making as founder of Razorfish back in the day, I suspected he could be an important player in making the breakthrough we are looking for in the enterprise social computing field to take our ideas mainstream. We have some smart people, prolific commentators, analysts and excellent product companies in this space, but somehow we felt the breakthrough required a smarter synthesis of ideas, technology and user experience than we have seen to date.

Whilst the world went wannabe-start-up crazy, Livio and I ploughed an old-fashioned furrow, building a cash positive business from day one, growing a strong team of consultants and developers and slowly and patiently working with companies and large organisations to help them understand and adopt social tools and business social networking. We have a pretty awesome client list and enjoy working on both sides of the firewall with commercial, media and public sector clients, but real change takes time and so we have played the long game.

When the downturn hit, we realised that this was an opportunity not to be missed. Rather than just argue the merits of network-centric management, people over process and the power of feedback and information flows, we felt companies now had an urgent economic imperative to reduce internal costs, do more with less, and to operate in a more agile and responsive way. At the end of 2008 and the beginning of 2009, we had our best quarters ever, but we recognised that we had to scale up to meet the bigger challenge of truly transforming organisations through social business design. But how? We had been down the VC route before in our previous start-up and were aware of the risks. Acquisition by a 'big player' would probably slow us down, not speed us up. What we were looking for was not cash or credibility (which arguably we already had) but some kind of disruptive rocket fuel and greater experience scaling a service business.

Initially, when we started talking to Jeff, we had no idea just how closely aligned our thinking was. Our ideas, based on practice, turned out to dove-tail perfectly with Jeff's thesis about social business design. He flew over to check us out and we spent a wonderful two days mind-melding, at which point I think we all realised that this was our destiny. Finally, when the lawyers and accountants were happy with the details, we completed the deal that marks the beginning of the next phase for Headshift.

So, what does the next phase look like?

We are ready to move beyond the experimental phase to create real business transformation. Leaving behind the niche world of enterprise 2.0, we are ready to work with businesses at a senior level to run change programmes aimed at bringing their processes, internal IT and communications into the Twenty-First Century. It has never been cheaper or easier to collaborate online. It has never been easier to harness people power to drive business performance. It has never been easier to engage with customers and business partners. Yet, as we know, most companies have come to accept an overly bureaucratic, process-heavy high-cost model of doing business as the norm. They need credible partners who can operate across technology, organisational design and business analysis to help meet this challenge, not just evangelists or technology vendors. That's our role.

Dachis Group's all-star team have developed some thinking around four levels of operation for social business:

• ecosystem: networks and relationships, inside and outside
• hivemindedness: collective awareness, engagement, and participation
• dynamic signals: ambient awareness, relevance, findability
• metafilters: filtering, tagging and sensemaking

We see great potential for addressing simple but important use cases at each of these levels of operation, but the main challenge in the short-term is how we can help second wave adopters make sense of the new world of social tools and networks, and this is something that keeps our feet firmly on the ground.

When we started out, over six years ago, we wrote our Readme.doc setting out a vision of what we wanted to achieve with Headshift. Looking back at this paper, we have lots left to do, but now we have engaged our second stage rockets, I think we will get there quicker. I can't wait to see where we get to by the end of our first decade.