Top 3 Considerations for Deploying Social Technology in the Enterprise

By Rich Blank (@pmpinsights) Feb 29, 2012

While we might expect social within the enterprise to be easy as Facebook or Twitter, it’s not. Deploying social technology within the enterprise is a journey filled with organizational hurdles that include compliance, security, culture change, executive sponsorship, budget and integration challenges to name just a few. In some organizations, this social journey begins when the business wants to embrace social before corporate IT is ready.

Often times the business seems to ignore these hurdles and the result is yet another silo of information — which, in actuality, becomes an unsanctioned content repository. The business, yes the business, seems to focus too much on technology, shiny new user interfaces, new smart phone applications or some marketing pitch about a “new way to work” and not enough on change management or the reality of a business world concerned about governance, risk, or compliance. Oh how “consumerization of IT” has turned the tables as it used to be the geeks in IT with the shiny new toys!

Enterprise social computing has quickly become a crowded and confusing market sector.

As the social technology space has evolved, it's become difficult for anyone evaluating vendors to untangle the marketing hype and buzzword overload. Some vendors offer standalone social “suites” with a unique and separate technology stack running outside of existing enterprise systems. In other cases, functional or departmental business applications like eLearning, CRM or applications originally designed for enterprise wikis are all jumping into the social game with more “suite-like” functionality.

It's important to ask the right questions and make an informed decision when it comes to social technology in the workplace. So what are the top considerations both business and IT should think about before jumping on the social bandwagon and making an enterprise technology purchase?

1. Don’t Ignore Organizational Hurdles.

The most successful deployments of social technology all have one thing in common: the social initiative across the organization focused less on technology and more on transforming culture and influencing employee behavior patterns.

Aside from culture change, today’s global business climate still has to deal with certain regulatory frameworks that include records management, e-discovery and governance policy. While social technology may be new and exciting, existing regulations around digital communications and content are the same and the risk of violations come with a cost. And governance, risk and compliance issues are too important to figure out later.

Be sure that you have the processes in place for records management and e-Discovery so you can manage the collection, preservation and retrieval of all social user-generated content. For example, when it comes to searching and extracting the relevant information in response to legal discovery requests, can you do that natively? Or must you use a third-party application or utility?

Organizations invest extensively in systems to carefully and comprehensively manage their retention and disposition of digital content and communications. How will your chosen social solution align with compliance related efforts if social exists in a separate infrastructure?

2. Focus on Integration with Existing IT Infrastructure & User Experience

Thoughtful integration will provide your workforce with a secure, collaborative environment and an integrated and more holistic user experience. Considering integration before making a decision will also ensure less headaches for IT when it comes to resources, administration and support.

How will the social platform integrate with the organization’s overall user experience including single sign-on, single profile, federated or integrated search, etc.? How will the social technology integrate with other unified communications tools you might already have in place? How will security trimming of content surfaced in a user's activity stream be handled across systems?