Leveraging Social Networking for Enterprise, but HOW?
31 October 2009 Tweet Yesterday I attended the SDForum conference on Collaboration 2.0: Collaboration in the Next Decade here in the San Francisco Bay Area. I shall offer my learnings from the conference as well as my editorial views.
The day-long conference presented and discussed many items, but the primary focus was on social media or social networking. Social media has obviously been quite popular on the consumer side – one has to just look at Facebook – yet enterprises struggle to understand what to do with it. Despite the title of the meeting, discussions revolved around the here & now and perhaps a year or two out, with no proposed or hypothesized vision on collaboration - not even for social media for consumer - five years out, let alone 10 years out, with once exception which I shall include towards the end.
Social media for consumer fulfills the “fun” part of life and the tribal need to connect and communicate with others. The game for enterprises is different; it is about creating economic value. Means may be fun and effective, but to what end? A panelist quipped, “ROI is very difficult. If you need to ask, you don’t need to know!” It drew a huge laughter from the crowd; it is indeed funny! This in a way sums up the challenge too: faith-based approach versus “by the numbers” traditional approach? It also reminds me an old saying: it you can’t measure it, you can’t fix it!
Social media or networking itself is a part of the collaborative process, but is it collaboration in itself, that creates value for the enterprise? Challenges remain! Does social networking equal effective, collaborative teams? Or, do effective, collaborative teams use the social media effectively? How is the power of social media channeled to focus on goals and objectives, in a collaborative environment, to improve productivity and promote innovation in the enterprise? What or who does the channeling of this powerful force? What promotes the power of social networking into “productive” collaboration effort? How does it happen? How can an enterprise facilitate, or even direct, this force? Or, is it an unguided missile, with tremendous power, without necessarily a productive target? What are the 5 Ws (who, what, where, when and how) of this missile? I can go on with many more questions, but you get the idea. To be fair, I did not expect answers to all my questions at one conference; however, I did hope to get some guidance and current thinking. I also recognize that a fool can ask more questions than a wise man/woman can answer.
Now we return to the regularly scheduled programming on the happenings and learnings at the SDForum conference.
Focus was on people being social and the tools they use. Tools and services included primarily Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, or variations thereof. Facebook was the star. Google Wave came up a few times. It is not what Google can do with Google Wave but what people will do with it, said one panelist. It is not about what a tool can do but what people do with the tool. One great example for enterprise was allowing the use of LinkedIn which turned out to be the most effective sales channel; referrals converted at a much better rate than any other sales/marketing channel.
I do not recall the word “strategy” mentioned, at least not in a way to address it. The term “process” came up once through a question, but the answers left me puzzled if not unsatisfied, with obtuse responses, as if to avoid the issue. What was not considered, even remotely, was: i) a holistic approach in the enterprise for collaboration that has strategy and context aimed at engaging people through an effective process with relevant tools, and ii) of course, the title of this post.
ROI came up a few times, recognizing its importance, but with little to no guidance on how to make a business case to decision-makers. The closest it came was that if a LoB (line of business) wants it, IT would do it, for a price.
Emphasis was on social networking moving from the consumer to enterprise side, but no specific insightful approaches or examples, other than current state of affairs with IM, VoIP and WebEx. It was more of a confirmation of what I knew and that I am not missing out on some big trends or pending disruptions or clever ways to think or some fantastic business ideas. Please do not get me wrong; I very much appreciate what speakers said. Sometimes hearing from others in their own words is interesting and provokes questions or ideas in one’s mind. And, there are always gems, along the way.
Here are some items that impressed me:
Someone said that Facebook is training half a billion people on social networking, with multiple applications running in the background. I really like this! I had not thought of Facebook in this way. Intuitively we know this, but someone articulated it so well and in a few words. This raises some interesting questions or challenges for the enterprise. Does the enterprise embrace this training and leverage it, but how? Does the enterprise take this training and mould to its economic objectives, but how? Does the enterprise only need to understand this behavior but create a behavior within its strategy and context, but how?
How does the enterprise have to evolve, to benefit from all this? Bing and Facebook partnership is great for the consumer, but what about the enterprise? How does the enterprise have to change to realize benefits?
Cisco’s approach to behavior change for collaboration is “push and pull,” said Didier Moretti. Push comes where such behavior is expected by the company and reinforced through incentives and performance metrics. Pull comes from allowing experimentation by employees where they have interests and ideas for collaboration for more effective outcomes. I really like insights like this; not the specific details but a specific approach, because it is actionable.
Another experience expressed on collaboration: i) Teams have taken their own form, ii) Teams have formed with common cause, both for finite-life projects and ongoing activities, and iii) People with interest initiate their own collaboration. This view was expressed for an R&D environment that has more flexibility and a greater need for collaboration. How does this translate to a more encompassing enterprise?
I found Chris Yeh of PBWorks as the most dynamic and impressive moderator/speaker, for his projection, insights and the manner in which he conducted a panel discussion with fluidity of provocative questions, ideas and suggestions. He introduced the concept of “immovable object” versus “irresistible force,” in the context of collaboration in the enterprise. He referred to the immovable object as the traditional CIO thinking of maintaining command and control, and the irresistible force as the bottoms-up pent-up demand of employees; for example, employees are using IM anyway with or without enterprise blessings. So, what wins? Since we were preaching to the choir, the crowd seemed to favor the irresistible force. While that may eventually be the destination, lots of questions remain on how and when we will get there.
Although it was not said in the context of the above, it does relate to the immovable object versus irresistible force. Asheem Chandana of Greylock said that IT would go from being a “craft” to being a “technician.” In the context of object v. force, it means that employees would force IT to “mashup” or allow employees to “mashup” the tools for their needs. The user is causing innovation in the use of technology and tools. This does raise some profound questions about the role of IT in the enterprise. The issue obviously remains as to how far along IT is on this line of thinking, or even if this is the right way of thinking. Nonetheless, it is provocative!
A provocative and contrarian view on collaboration was expressed by a questioner. He asked the panel to comment on the “promise of collaboration versus time sink of multitasking.” He cited a Stanford study that found multitasking to be a time sink, contradicting the widely-held view that doing many things concurrently makes one more productive.
One panelist said that there is a huge difference between collaboration and facilitation. Collaboration is dirty, ugly and involves fighting. There will be no collaboration until you allow them to argue, fight, break rules and foul up. This raises the challenge of ensuring a productive outcome, doesn’t it? How do you do that?
Barriers to adoption: What do I get out of this? Is it a part of my performance metrics? What will it take me to get there? What are the barriers to traditional change management (because they apply)? What will it take for compliance, regulation and archiving? How can the enterprise manage security?
The issue of profile/identity also featured prominently. This is also something we have been hearing about for a long while now. Margaret Francis of Scout Labs gave examples of combining and leveraging for marketing the user information that is available inside the enterprise and out in the social networks.
There was an ongoing discussion on cloud versus on-premise. It reminded me of the old discussion on centralized versus decentralized. There is never a definite right answer, because it depends. Cloud seemed to the crowd favorite however.
Now let me return to the vision thing that I promised in the beginning. James Lundy of Gartner offered his views on Collaboration 4.0. I better get started on Collaboration 10.0 soon, before James gets started with revising his deck of slides! I must confess, as you can see from my questions, sprinkled throughout this post, that I am still working on Collaboration 2.0 and need a lot of help. Sorry for the detour! James suggests that Collaboration 4.0 is: i) Collaboration going real-time, ii) Data portability, iii) Integrated mobility, and iv) Social analytics. I admire James for putting together a point-of-view, because his was the only one in the conference. We shall see how it turns out, because some of these things I have been hearing about since Collaboration 0.0. I am still waiting for the promised “convergence” from about a couple of decades ago, but that is a different topic.
I enjoyed the conference. Obviously, a lot more was talked about in the conference than I can capture here. These are my take-aways and the questions they provoked. The whole conference was video taped, so you are liable to see at least some snippets, if not the whole thing, on the web soon.
I do have some parting thoughts. For a conference on collaboration, and particularly on social networking, some things would have been “nice to have.” For example, I do not have the names and affiliations of people who attended the conference, nor their websites, blogs, Twitter or Skpe accounts, etc. to develop my social network of people who are interested in collaboration. At the end, I have a handful of business cards only because you could not possibly meet all attendees. I recognize the terribly busy schedule of speakers and panelists, but I wish they hung around for a bit to actually interact with the crowd “socially.”
All in all, it was a great day in sunny California with great people!
Lokesh Datta
Reader Comments (10)
Great report and insights!
Sounds from the last paragraph there is a something of a need for the conference organizers to take more of their medicine and encourage greater collaboration among the participants?
So often, like the cry of "Physician, Heal Thyself!" I want to cry out: "Collaborators, Collaborate Better!"
Lokesh,
Great summary, thanks for doing this. I also met with Chris Yeh of PB works on Thursday and did a story on PBWorks http://collaborate.com/?q=blog/2009/11/02/pbworks-offers-new-real-time-functions . I will also cross link your summary so people on my site (www.collaborate.com) can see your summary also.
As for Collaboration 4.0, that's pretty out there, I am still trying to come up with a definition for Collaboration 3.0 and I wrote the book (literally) on Collaboration 2.0. Many people and companies I know have not even gotten that far. In the report I did on Social Collaboration in the Enterprise only about 1/3 of the companies surveyed were actively doing work with Social Networks (another 1/3 were thinking about it or evaluating, and the final 1/3 had no plans).
David,
Thank you! We would certainly love a link back to this post.
I should have mentioned in the blog post, but I will mention it now that Chris Yeh of PBWorks mentioned your name. Paraphrasing now, he said, “David Coleman of collaborate.com said that a tool that gets in the way of collaboration is not a collaboration tool.” It was a brief 1-2 sentence mention, as he was conducting a panel discussion, but I quite liked it.
I hope I was not being too flippant in my comments on Collaboration 4.0, because I am still trying to figure out many things. It does give me comfort to hear your comments on the topic because I know that you literally wrote the book on Collaboration 2.0.
Thanks David. We will be in touch!
I am a veteran of several earlier IT wars:
PC wars - should PCs be allowed at all in the corporate setting? Fought between the IT department and the business units; fought over the personal productivity tools of word processing and spreadsheet programs.
Word processing and spreadsheet wars. A multi-user war between opposing business units AND IT. The word processing war was primarily between Word and WordPerfect, with other participants (remember MultiMate and WordPro?). The spreadsheet war was between Lotus, Excel and other participants (remember CA SuperCalc and Borland Quattro Pro?).
There is no Collaboration equivalent of the PC wars. With PCs and the internet ubiquitious, there is no keeping the tools out of the corporation. If IT chooses to fight, it will only be a losing, rearguard action.
Will there be a Collaboration 2.0 or 3.0 version of those software wars. Will Twitter, Facebook, Linked-in, MySpace, other Cloudster options, even Windows Live becme the battlefields between opposing business units, even opposing individuals? As in previous wars, will IT have to become the peacemaker?
What do you think? Feel free to leave out the military metaphors.
Excellent summary and a lot to think about. Being part of an enterprise that has to deal with constantntly changing landscape on technology front and verious cost and competitive pressure on the business side, it is a struggle to decide what is the right level of investment an enteprise must make in collaboration tools/technology and where does this particular discipline fall in the priority list.
In my opinion, the biggest impact of social networking phenomenon will be the expectations that it creates in the minds of your current and future customers and how that might impact their choice of picking your company over your compltetion that is more savvy at incprporating social networking within their business. Not sure what that may transalte into but it will be interesting.
Subsequent to this post, I asked on LinkedIn: How is your organization leveraging social media/networking for collaboration? To what degree and to what level of success? What are the critical factors for success?
Here are some replies I received:
“The simple answer is, I get lots of visibility here, which leads to new clients, which leads to more income...” Dave Maskin
“I go with Dave... The critical factor is about understanding what you want to say and to whom. Social Media marketing is not hard once you understand the basics.
Links: http://www.siliconcloud.com” Patrick Murphy
“My company has just announced the imminent roll out of some social media tools by providing people leaders with a social media usage policy. Not sure what they plan on rolling out yet, but I'll keep you posted.” Gina Vliet
“I work in the investment industry where regulation and compliance rule the day. Social media is a non-starter at my company and indeed at many companies similar to mine. There are a few examples of investment companies announcing customer-facing social media platforms but my take is that they do it just for the cool factor. Its a cheap marketing tool to say that customers can now follow you on twitter, but how much is that really going to benefit the company. Not much in my opinion. As I think about it, I can't name any large scale successes for social media in the investment industry.
I do believe that my job could benefit from some sort of social networking however. As a research analyst, I often come across one-off things that I don't really know about. For example, last week I needed to come up to speed on clean coal. If I had some sort of facebook type app that listed all the research staff in my firm and/or everyone in my contact list along with their areas of expertise/companies and sectors covered with an IM function, then that would be a powerful tool. But because of compliance constraints surrounding what can be said internally and externally, getting something like this up and running is very difficult.” Anthony Venturino
” Check out the Palo Alto Networks Application Uage and Risk Report ( http://www.paloaltonetworks.com/literature/AUR_report1109.html ); some highlights can be found at http://www.readwriteweb.com/enterprise/2009/11/palo-alto-networks-the-lines-b.php .” John Hazel
“I am on LinkedIn and have used it to search for new hires. Some of the people I have met in this way have become friends and useful contacts.” Michael Thompson
“I didn't attend the conference but the summary notes were interesting. When I think about ROI related to social media I believe we need to focus on qualitative information/examples of the value. For example, if someone was actively engaged in a community where potential buyers exist and conversations lead to a deeper dialog with a prospect eventually purchasing your products and services from your sales force that datapoint should be used to help position the potential value of social media within the customer buying process and in supporting lead engagement and nuturing. A few practical examples and establishing best practices can help get an organization bought into spending more time in this channel without the need for hard ROI --at least initially. Another big area for another post is the use of social media to understand how your brand is perceived and what people are saying about you and your products and services.” Mark Digman
“the enterprise can enable multiple real time conversations or shared work efforts at the speed of typing, which is impossible with speech alone” Michael Carpenter
Subsequent to this post, I asked on LinkedIn: Will IT go from a “craft” to a “technician” -- collision of Immovable Object of traditional CIO thinking and Irresistible Force of pent-up user demand for collaboration tools?"
Here are some replies I received:
“Certain aspects of IT have gone from craft to commodity throughout the history of business. In 1980, only computer-savvy people could think about putting numbers into a Lotus spreadsheet and doing trend analysis or even reporting. Now, spreadsheet abilities are a commodity skill.
The fact that things like IM and social networking tools are more familiar to people is nothing new. But truly using these items for business purposes escapes most users. IT will always have a place to show users the best way to use these tools to get their job done.” Mark Benish
“It's an interesting time for IT. Check out Nicholas Carr's book, Does IT Matter.
http://www.nicholasgcarr.com/doesitmatter.html
I also address this topic in a chapter of my next book.
Long story short: IT's at a crossroads. The traditional services offered are becoming more of a commodity and IT needs to be more of a business partner if many organizations.” Phil Simon
“Collaboration tools are but one of many challenges facing CIOs. Use of externally-hosted tools (such as salesforce.com), user-requested equipment (such as iPhones) are other challenges the CIOs face.
They are under pressure because their mission today is to (1) meet more diverse needs, (2) with less money (development and operating), and (3) make sure everything works (reliability and security). These new tools and demands put their mission at risk without meeting any of their core goals. And who will the users call when one of their tools "breaks"? The IT support desk.
What is needed is for the other executives who enjoy the benefit of these new tools and approaches to collaborate with the CIOs to help fund them or create the business case, together make choices that minimize the risks and costs to the IT core, and to abide by some reasonable rules.
For CIOs it means they are part of a corporate team, rather than an emperor deciding everyone's IT fate.
Sounds like a more collaborative environment!” Steve Lamont
After social networks, what next? Are social networks the internet's last big development? And how much will they change? A star panel in Oxford asks big questions.
34 Interesting Facebook Statistics and Facts: http://www.penn-olson.com/2009/12/02/25-interesting-facebook-statistics-and-facts/
HOW TO: Use Social Media to Retain Customers: http://mashable.com/2009/12/08/customer-retention/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Mashable+%28Mashable%29
Beware Social Media Snake Oil
Hordes of marketing "experts" are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs. All the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/09_50/b4159048693735.htm
Investing in Potential: The Real Danger of Social Media Marketing?
http://www.pamil-visions.net/social-media-marketing-2/29258/
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