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Get Real

Enterprise 2.0 being a big deal, with double-digit productivity improvements, means it should be relatively easy to define a convincing business case for deploying social technologies. A pretty convincing specific business case.

It doesn't suffice to say: "We've got an internal coordination problem. Let's roll out some Yammer." That's not going to solve anything, and those languishing Yammer deployments show up in our market research as "deployed social technology, but needs improvement".

Instead, take a look at where exactly the bottlenecks in your internal communications are most annoying. Email is being overloaded with supporting a lot of ad-hoc, sub-optimal decision making and information sharing. Digging in a bit will reveal painful examples of time wasting and miscommunication.

Ask Questions

For each of these examples, ask yourself:

• Can this be done better by switching to social collaboration patterns?
• What would the results look like?
• How can we measure that?
• Which constraints do we need to remove?
• Who needs to be involved?
• Who is going to resist this change, and why?
• How can we support the transition?
• What is the time frame required to obtain results?
• Does this support our overall strategic objectives?

Only when these questions are answered, does it make sense to roll out a social technology that specifically supports this effort. The technology in itself is quite simple. It's the embedding into organizational change and organizational routines that is the hard work.

Answering the questions above provides the proper foundation for realizing success in social collaboration.

Focus On Business Value

Focusing on the business case first, defining Key Performance Indicators and taking the long view, has several advantages:

• It keeps business goals center stage and frames the effort in terms that are readily understood by management;
• It provides clear goals and context for the technology effort, enabling feature prioritization and cost control;
• It guides a targeted effort, reducing risk and maximizing return on investment;
• It keeps the change effort grounded in organizational realities;
• It provides strong arguments to counter politically motivated obstruction;
• It provides quantitative data to measure progress and evaluate the results.

What are your experiences in developing a business case for social technology enabled organizational change? Your comments are welcome below.

Enterprise 2.0 is a Big Deal

First of all, Enterprise 2.0 is a big deal. The McKinsey research everybody quotes estimates the impact of social technologies, done right, at a 20% to 25% productivity improvement. Other studies arrive at comparable estimates.

Please go back and read that again. 25%.

What is the ambition level of most of your policy priorities for the next year? An improvement of 1%, 2%? Maybe 5%? Surely not the double-digit improvements social technology has to offer.

So, this is a big deal. Anything that makes your employees 25% more productive is a huge, freakin' big deal. Which brings us to the second point.

Enterprise 2.0 Is Not A Technology Fix

Anything that promises to achieve this level of impact will require deep organizational change. You just cannot expect a 25% productivity increase while not changing operational procedures.

Indeed, the benefits of Enterprise 2.0 do not flow from the technology involved. The benefits result from the changed ways of collaboration, communication and organization that are enabled by social technology.

This is a key point, and it appears to be easily overlooked. The benefits derive from organizational change. Without organizational change, you will not get the benefits. Casting this as an IT exercise kills your business case.

Sadly, this is exactly what happens: Gartner reports that 80 percent of social business efforts fail this way. Instead of focusing on technology,

Social Technology Is A Strategic Enabler For Organizational Change

Finally, you cannot do this without social technologies. Nobody expects to be able to run a multinational with smoke signals. Likewise, replacing bureaucratic structures with more nimble, faster learning networks requires a different technology base than the industrial-age type systems everybody uses.

This is what trips many a manager up, I suspect. If you think that something is either strategy or technology, you've fallen into the mind trap that considers technology to be a secondary, operational thingy. That used to be so, but it ain't so anymore.

Even if you're in some apparently low-tech industry, technology has become, or will very soon become, a core competency for your organization to survive. How else will you effectively connect customers, employees and suppliers with each other?

In the final part of this blog post series, we'll sketch a way out of this dilemma.

Enterprise 2.0

Enter Enterprise 2.0: the application, within the enterprise, of collaboration tools that have evolved on the open web.

And then something goes wrong. Managers hear "tools" and "web", and delegate to IT to provide a new "social intranet". A strategic organizational change requirement just got demoted to an operational technology issue. Which then fizzles out, since technology by itself cannot change organizational performance to the degree that is required.

It doesn't help that most of the management layer grew up before the web even existed.

Business Practices That Refuse To Die

It also doesn't help that the web is full of nice stories like the video below, which presents replacing email with social technologies as a magic bullet solution.

Sure, email has to be reduced and social technologies have a lot of potential. But this video hides some pretty big issues:

• Replacing email with social technology only works if everybody is using the social technology.
• How do you get everybody to use the social technology?
• What do you do when not everybody switches away from email?
• Instead of moving ad-hoc processes unchanged to social platforms, isn't there an opportunity to improve social decision making processes?

Outside The Inbox

Luis Suarez, who is famous as the man that lives outside the inbox, provides a more nuanced picture. If you listen closely to his story, you'll get an idea of the effort involved to cut down on email.

Social technologies enable us to move away from email. Doing so requires much more than just sprinkling some "magic technology dust": it requires people to change their behaviors, and it requires organizations to change their routines.

In the part 2 of this 3-part blog post series, we'll explore just how big a deal this is.

Internal communication is a problem

Internal communication is perceived to be a problem by 40% of the respondents. In large organisations, that rises to 75%.

When asked, what can be done to improve internal communications, the top 3 reasons are: better internal agreements, training and digital document sharing.

The need for better agreements, and the need for more clear function delineation, are suggestive of deep-running organizational issues that require more than a technology fix. At Cosent we strongly believe that deploying social technology should be embedded in a wider organizational change strategy.

What goals does improving internal communication serve? The top 3 are improving collaboration, improving knowledge sharing and improving productivity. While collaboration is obvious and corresponds with the coordination issues listed above, the high score for knowledge sharing is especially interesting.

Social intranet is a solution

When asked whether a social intranet would add value to the organisation, a whopping 90% sees either "added value" or "a lot of added value" in deploying a social intranet. CEOs are least convinced, and IT decisionmakers are most convinced of that added value.

We've measured adoption of a wide range of specific social features in intranets, like blogging, commenting, activity streams and workspaces. The first interesting finding is, that there's not much difference in the adoption between features. Apparently these are rolled out together.

Secondly, our data paints a picture of a very healthy social intranet market with organisations about equally distributed across al phases of the adoption cycle of social functionalities.

Finally, a lot of organisations that have deployed a social intranet appear to be struggling to achieve business benefits, with around 20% reporting that social functionality has been deployed but needs to be improved.

In summary: internal communications is seen as a problem that needs attention, and social intranets are seen as a viable solution to this problem. Many organizations are rolling out social features but only a minority report being satisfied with the results yet.

In a following blog post we'll take a deeper look at the reasons for that.