Tag: social

Business Value of Social Computing (III)

Welcome to the third installment of the business value of social computing post series. You can review the first and the second post of the series, if you haven’t already done so. In this post I will higlight two main problems with the social computing today.

We have seen what social means and what parts make up the mosaic of social computing. We have also seen why do businesses use social and what benefits it can bring. However, businesses still cope with lack of adoption. Why is that? From our experience in deploying Beezy social network for SharePoint to our many customersmany customers, we have learned some key insights on the social success patterns, in the companies that have succeeded in social. We have also learned what doesn’t work, so to avoid it in future deployments.

Here are the two pain points with social computing today:

Social Is Slow to Grow

The enterprise social networks (ESN) are still a young technology. Even if they have been available for years now, they haven’t become mainstream until few years ago. If you compare it to a well-established technology such as OLAP datawarehouses or business process management (BPM), it still has to crystallize into best practice patterns and actionable guidance.

There are several reasons for this slowness in the adoption of social. It is a very disruptive technology, because it changes the way people work and share information. A change of this magnitude needs a lot of time to "stick" (some studies say that it can take 18 months for a change to become durable). In today’s fast-paced world, the instantaneous results we expect of deploying any new technology won’t be there with social. Embracing social in the company is a marathon, not a sprint. It has to be nurtured, encouraged and guided.

Also, the lack of clear guidance and the variety of use cases of social in different sectors and companies don’t help much to speed up the adoption. There are too many contradictory messages and guidelines out there. A company that wants to adopt social computing can’t just expect to plug it in and reap the benefits. It’s a slow-paced progress, but it’s also a steady journey. Have patience!

There Are Common Pitfalls in the Way

The second frequent pain point with ESN has to do with the common pitfalls and barriers to the successful adoption of social at work. Over and over again, companies have faced lack of social adoption and the root causes are very common between all of them.

The first cause of social failure is the lack of an overall strategy for social. As I said before, social computing isn’t a database engine that is simply plugged in. It needs to be deployed in the context of a greater business strategy, in order to achieve business goals. If you deploy first and ask for the business need later, you are putting the cart before the horse. Keep in mind that social is a tool, and not an end in itself. (You can check part 2 of the series for a refresher on the common business cases for social).

The second common cause of lack of adoption is having too many competing priorities. It means that the company is picking many desirable technology projects but doesn’t really commit hard on any one of them. While not putting all your eggs in the same basket is a common sense, not committing is akin to a paper tiger: looks strong from the distance but shaky when confronted. You will need "teeth" (business support and gravitas) to overcome resistance to change, and starting without that support is a recipe for a disaster. If you don’t have executive sponsors for your social endeavour, don’t even start. I have warned you Smile

The third cause is not having a clear business case. As I said few paragraphs before: every business has a unique case for social. You will have to find yours. If it’s lackluster or too broad, your users won’t find any value in the extra hassle that is needed to learn the new technology. It won’t work for them. Make sure to find your value proposition for social in order to start on the right track.

Summary

We have seen how social is by its nature slow to grow and how it’s easily derailed by common pitfalls. If you plan your social computing deployment having into account these facts, your chances of success will be higher.

 

Do you have something to add to this conversation? Make sure to leave a comment below.

Business Value of Social Computing (II)

Note: This is a second post in the series. You can check the first post to refresh the concepts.

In the first post I have defined what social is and what components it has. In this post I will explain why social is used in the companies. As always, a certain technology is not used because it’s brightest and shiniest thing out there (a strategy which works well with techno-addicts). It is used in companies because it helps to achieve a desired goal that has nothing to do with the technology.

So, the first component of "why social" is to find what we want to achieve with social. The answer to this question has to be technology-free and has to map with the business objectives of the company.

Social | Wood Human figures

But what happens when you have no clue about what social can be used in your company? Well, then you check what the majority of the companies is using it for and then extrapolate for your own needs. So, let’s see how social pioneers (the early adopters) use social.

In a 2013 social business study by Sloan Management and Deloitte, there are four main business objectives in the companies that are achieved with deploying and using social computing:

#1 To better understand the market

The most frequent use of social is to gain better insight into the market shifts. How can social help us there? Well, the answer is that social fosters quicker information exchange that gets timely answers to the market analysts. There is no quicker way, except for watercooler chat.

#2 To identify internal talent

The second most frequent use of social in the enterprise is to identify the subject matter experts around a certain topic. As social technologies allow for quick and easy content creation, tagging and gamification features in social can increase the visibility of the people who post valuable content. In a certain way, the social uncovers the "informal organization chart" of the company, centered on the knowledge and not the hierarchy.

#3 To improve visibility into operations

Social is also used to add greater transparency and visibility into the daily grinding and routine in the company. It is more direct and personal than a weekly statistics review sent to all the company by email. The social platform is also a great outlet to publish metrics that add insight into the company operations.

#4 To improve strategy development

Collaborative strategy development is enabled with social. Strategy can be discussed in more open, honest and productive way using social than organizing formal meetings. Sometimes, the valuable insight into the strategy is provided by the subject matter expert that is unlikely to be present in a more formal discussion.

And you? What do you use social for? I’d like to hear from your experiences.

Post photo: by jdhancock

Business Value of Social Computing (I)

Hello there! I’d like to start a new serie of posts where I want to hightlight and demystify the benefits of introducing and extending enterprise social networks (ESN) in companies. There is a lot of material online about the social networks, with diverging and even contradictory findings. I would like to present a summary of the most important points that link social networks and business. I will not talk about a specific technology such as Beezy or Yammer or SharePoint, but about the underlying business value.

In this first post I will focus on defining the subject at hand.

What is Social?

The first thing to define is the "social" we all talk about. If we look up the origin of the word, it comes from Latin "sociālis" and it means "of or belonging to a companion or companionship or association". It further refers us to Latin word "socius" which means "a companion, fellow, partner, associate, ally". As you can see, the word "social" always means something that is shared among our companions, it is always something that belongs to more than one person.

The term "social networking" is also defined in the dictionary as "the interaction between a group of people who share a common interest". This is the definition that is more important to us. It highlights that we engage in social networking to interact with other people that share a common goal or interest.

Up to now, social and social networking doesn’t mean that we use technology at all. We exercise social networking when we chat with our friends over a beer. But, when we introduce social networking in the corporate world, we find that the clear-cut definition we had until now transforms into several enterprise social networking definitions.

In order to establish a baseline with the keywords that will help us later on, let’s define "enterprise social networking" as a combination of three factors orbiting around the concept of communities.

Communities, People, Activities and Content

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  • Community
    • A community is the group of people that share a specific interest. The whole idea of social network is intimately related to the concept of emerging communities. Communities can arise around a certain interest common to the members (communities of interest or practice) or around a common feature that the members share (departamental, gender and geographical-based communities). However, the concept of community is that it always revolve around something common to more than one person.
  • People
    • The members of a community and the participants in the social network. The people contribute their individual diversity to enrich a community with their activities and content.
  • Activities
    • People post statuses, ask questions, look for answers and rank the information and people in the community. All these discrete actions are called activities.
  • Content
    • The information contributed by the people with their activities inside the community. A community without content is possible, but it is not a healthy community.

Now we should have a clear meaning of the factors that interact in a enterprise social network environment: the communities, the people, the activities and the content. With this in mind, we can review what social is used for in the corporate environment.