If you thought you were the only one not doing enterprise social networking, Mike Gotta of The Burton Group can reassure you. In a recently published study called “Social Networking Within the Enterprise” (registration required), he explains:
Study participants felt that they were behind their competitors—or the market in general—when it came to their social networking initiatives. Based on the results of this field research project, Burton Group concludes that such perceptions were unfounded. Many organizations have yet to make an enterprise-wide decision on social networking technology. Even in those that have, most projects are in proof-of-concept or early stages of deployment. Burton Group also concludes that organizations are struggling with many non-technology issues within social networking initiatives (e.g., business case, metrics, policies and controls, roles and responsibilities, employee participation models, and cultural dynamics).
Here’s a quick summary of some of the issues covered in the report:
Nobody agrees on the value of social networking. There are starkly drawn lines between people who think that it’s going to have a transformational impact, and those that think that it’s useless in a business context – or worse, a huge waste of time and resources.
Possible uses of social networking. Where projects exist, the rationale for them is typically one of: keeping up with “Gen Y” expectations, implementing the next generation of information sharing, help locating experts in the organization, community building, or talent management.
Building a business and ROI case is tough. Social networking is perceived as a discretionary project, it’s tough to point to tangible benefits, and existing tools are perceived as “good enough”.
it’s all about culture. Unsurprisingly, it’s tough to get traction for social networking in formal organizations where conservative managers believe in control and employees are suspicious of sharing information.
Adult supervision is required. You can’t just ignore governance, legal, HR, security, and compliance. Even with well-intentioned people exercising self-supervision, successful projects will generate their own problems (how do you incent people? what to do with employees that don’t want to take part? how will you deal with intellectual property concerns?). And, of course, as soon as you start monitoring and auditing behavior, that can leads to employee privacy concerns.
Successful projects focus on adoption. Recognizing active contributors, lowering barriers to access, etc. “Corporate Facebook” sites with clear profiles of employee expertise are a popular and effective starting-point.
IT typically hinders more than helps. IT organizations are typically too focused on explicit functional systems, resource-constrained, and operationally focused to drive social networking successfully.
Companies like a platform approach. IBM (Lotus Connections), Jive Software (Clearspace), and Microsoft (Office SharePoint Server 2007) were the most frequently cited platforms.