Technology, Society, Work & Play

“Can Enterprise Social Networking Pay Off” Information Week article 23-Mar-09

Many CIOs believe that social networking tools benefit the business, but measuring the impact is difficult, the typical methods (e.g. ROI) are not available, so many ‘going with their gut’ and looking for different ways to quantify the value. The article suggests three possible areas of benefit (i.e. use cases):

1. Bridges organizational information divisions and allows for serendipitous connections “moving conversations out of e-mails and hallways and into … wikis and blogs”
2. Allows people to add context to information stores, bookmarking or tagging articles that they found useful
3. Helps people find and connect to coworkers through user profiles

Employees of Transunion kept on asking if they could set up a Facebook group for staff, when polled 2000 out of 2700 had some kind of social networking presence; so for the management, the motivation to deploy it within the organization was to stop it from happening outside of the organization.
The ROI they use is the that by having people solve problems amongst themselves, they don’t ask IT for more hardware or software to throw at the problem (which I think is a little shaky, but I’ll let it slide); the more interesting revelation from this case-study is that, whereas before they had to rely on the grapevine to see who was asking good questions and who was giving good answers the management now have data to show this. The organization uses Socialtext software, which sits alongside SharePoint, the CTO draws the line thus; SharePoint for fixed processes, Socialtext for discussions about how to improve the process

Pfizer uses internal social apps to allow staff to gain proficiency in building external customer communities

The most significant barrier to adoption seems to be anxiety about content, it is doubtless that social networking tools raise questions about compliance, discover-ability and moderating employee behavior. This anxiety is fueled by a comparison to the consumer focused siblings such as twitter and Facebook, even though many enterprise solutions manage users ability to edit copy and share content. At the same time, there is anxiety that an organization may be loosing out on an opportunity to gain competitive advantage through the collaborative benefits of these tools.

The article suggests 5 best practices:

1. Test the Waters – Try out social networking with a low cost pilot (e.g. hosted or open-source).
2. Set Modest expectations – Pitch the project as a pilot (not something that will transform the organization) set one or two achievable goals and state how you will measure value, engage enthusiastic groups in the pilot, have an exit strategy if it doesn’t work out.
3. Don’t Let Fear Strangle growth – Monitoring (or moderating) employee generated content will kill adoption, people need time to get comfortable with speaking up and sharing ideas without fear of consequences.
4. Resist Exclusivity – Many groups will want a gated community, however most managers learn to see the value of exposing the community to a broad audience.
5. Don’t Forget about Search – Search underpins social networks, the better the search, the more valuable the platform. Search should allow for user generated feedback (e.g. tags, stars) and should search associated databases

Here’s the killer quote:

“In the absence of company-provided tools, employees will take it upon themselves to integrate consumer apps into their work-lives”.

So even despite fuzzy ROI and intangible benefits, many CIOs are deploying these tools because they want their staff to use applications that they can manage and have a modicum of control over.

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