Social Business: Four Steps to Getting Compliant

By Joe Shepley (@joeshepley) Nov 8, 2011

In my last post, I walked through some of the reasons why compliant social business is so challenging. In this post, I want to take a look at the four steps organizations need to take in order to give themselves the best chance of solving the compliance challenges of going social.

The four steps to getting compliant are:

Create a cross-functional body to 'own' the problem of social media compliance
Find out what’s happening with social media at all levels of your organization
Focus on creating a reasonable, defensible social media compliance strategy
Manage social media compliance the way you manage traditional compliance

Let's look at each in detail:

1. Create a cross-functional body to 'own' the problem of social media compliance

Those of you who read me regularly could have guessed that this would be part of my top four best practices. I’m a huge believer in the efficacy of cross-functional teams for just about any business challenge.

And I know that center of excellence, community of practice, and so on, may be dirty words at some organizations, with good reason. Often, these groups end up being more about bureaucracy than results and take on a life of their own: they seem to spend more time justifying their own existence rather than delivering business-relevant results.

That’s not the kind of cross-functional body I have in mind.

Picture instead a group of folks drawn from IT, governance, risk management and compliance (GRC), and the relevant line of business functions, all of whom have a vested, personal interest in how their organization might use social media and enterprise collaboration modalities to become a truly social business.

These would be people like enterprise architects, network engineers, application developers, service desk associates or business analysts; HR, regulatory compliance, ethics, finance, records management or risk management representatives as well as those involved in all facets of legal operations, from contracting to litigation; and representatives from all areas of operations, from sales, marketing and customer service, to product development, supply chain and beyond.

They would be focused on making decisions about how the organization will pursue social media and enterprise collaboration to meet the varying requirements of the constituencies they represent.

And beyond just giving you the best chance of making sound business decisions about social media and enterprise collaboration, such a group allows you to have both the enterprise buy in and organizational visibility to succeed at building a compliant, competitive, effective social business.

2. Find out what’s happening with social media at all levels of your organization

First rule of compliance is if you don’t know about it, you can’t govern it.

Not surprisingly, then, a lot of Enterprise 1.0 compliance efforts are centered around ensuring adequate visibility into business operations to both monitor and better ensure compliance. And despite these efforts (and the years we’ve spent honing our compliance capabilities to maximize their effectiveness), achieving adequate E1.0 compliance visibility can still be a challenge at many organizations.

As you can imagine, the visibility challenge is multiplied with social media and enterprise collaboration, not only because the majority of corporate compliance practitioners are new to it, but also because the nature of these domains is federated, grass roots, agile and decentralized.

So the first step for your newly-minted cross-functional group of social business stakeholders is to document as much of the social media and enterprise collaboration activity currently in flight as possible.