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the Free CMSWire NewsletterIf your organization is planning to successfully transition to social business, there's much for you to learn from these key lessons I have observed over the years.
Many businesses are implementing social software of some kind in their organizations these days. Typical examples include social intranets, enterprise social networks, or social collaboration applications such as wikis or social content management systems.
Some organizations have been more successful than others with social business while others — though they still see benefits — find them less strategic. Yet it's clear today that many organizations are indeed reaping significant rewards in terms of productivity, knowledge retention, innovation and other measures of business performance as they apply social media to the way they work.
Over the last several years, I've also begun to see a pattern emerge from the efforts of those that have started to make the transition to social business. The first is that successful initiatives required sustained effort and commitment across the organization, from top to bottom. Critical mass often plays a role in reaching a satisfactory outcome and seems to lie around the 20% mark, meaning that a fifth of the organization is regularly doing their work in social business channels. This usually marks the permanent change of enough behavior to make it a standard and accepted way of working.
Other key lessons learned are listed below and represents my personal experience in working with and discussing the issues of social business with dozens of large organizations. Your mileage may vary, but I find that this list resonates strongly with those in the trenches working to improve the way their organizations function circa 2011.
I'd also note that these lessons learned have come at no minor cost of time, effort, and resources and are thus worth considering at length. You will find that they address many of the major decision points about what to focus on and what drives improved outcomes when applying social media within a large organization.
1. Changing behavior is more important — and harder — than selecting the tools.
Today's workers are typically very busy and already multitask a great deal. Their attention is typically fragmented across too many tools already. Getting them to change the way they work, particularly if it's deeply ingrained, is often the biggest challenge. Work processes must become more open, shared and transparent in a social business world but many corporate cultures will be the biggest obstacle when there is a belief that controlling information represents power.
Many social business efforts undergo intense efforts to select the right tools but far too little effort in identifying and driving the necessary cultural and behavioral changes that will result in much better outcomes. Many companies are also reticent to invest in large-scale change management efforts based on the cost and perceived potential for disruption. The lesson here is that while the right social technology is a required enabler, proactive behavior change is equally necessary.
2. There is no one platform. There shouldn't be dozens either.
Most organizations I encounter try to select one large social software platform to standardize upon. They are compelling reasons to do this and historically there was usually just one email, portal or unified communication tool. However, social is starting to come at organizations from every avenue these days, even being woven into the fabric of existing appellations from many major software vendors. Example: Content management and document management are just two popular application types that are sprouting social features that will compete directly with any single platform selection. Then there is the social business "stack" of which social media tools proper are just one aspect, with the others being listening, management, analytic, security, compliance, moderation and business intelligence tools that layer on top of the social media components.
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