I had the chance to hear Gartner’s Jeffrey Mann at the ITxpo Symposion in Barcelona, Spain today giving a talk, “Creating Your Social and Collaboration Strategy.” Very timely topic as enterprise social is finally a done deal. Consensus has arrived that enterprise social has value and senior leadership is buying into the need to get started now and not later.

This is an important, crossroads moment for enterprise social computing. But we’ve reached the point of agreement without agreeing on ‘why and how’ of implementing social and collaboration platforms. One fork in the road leads to cynicism and the other toward success.

Starting with strategy

Much of what he brought up isn’t new to those who’ve been in technology…that we need purpose, scope, justification, metrics, etc. But what he talked about next is what comes after enterprise social media is up and running. It is the justification few understand and even fewer are working toward. It blows away the thinking of social as a technologically advanced way to collaborate.

Next generation social – metadata

What lurks just around the corner from enterprise social technology is a focus on the metadata that social produces: Where are the groups that are active or inactive? (continued…)

It’s not a new product or a new app. It’s is a way of thinking about enterprise social networking as a platform for keeping track of your own collections of knowledge, but more importantly, making those collections discoverable, searchable and collaborative.

Here is an example from a past project. Jane (we’ll call her) was following the development and definition of the Basel III reserve requirements. She had set up alerts via Google and was subscribing to relevant feeds to always stay informed of the latest developments. Part of her workflow consisted of filtering the information she received. Perhaps between one and five percent of the alerts pointed to new and relevant information. Her filtering thus increased the relevance of the content. When Jane came across something useful she would print out the article and put it in a binder. Jane often referred to the articles in the binder in the course of her work, and a few colleagues who knew about Jane’s collection would sometimes ask for information related to their work.

With the arrival of an enterprise social network, Jane shifted her workflow from printing and hole punching to storing the articles electronically. Liberating the process from physical constraints had the immediate benefit of speeding up the workflow. (continued…)

Modern business is predicated on collaboration, but most companies struggle when it comes to creating and managing the technologies, processes, and people that enable the effective exchange of information within a company. According to McKinsey, the disconnect is huge, with close to 80% of executives believing collaboration is critical to growth, but only 25% describe their organization as being effective at collaboration. It’s startling that so few executives are satisfied with their collaboration efforts given that what these executives want is remarkably simple – for employees to be able to collaborate on demand. Imagine if collaboration was as simple as making a phone call where anyone is able to pick up the phone, hear a dial tone, and know that there is a ubiquitous network capable of connecting them with people around the world.

How can companies achieve the promise of collaboration on demand? There are countless tips on improving employee collaboration, but here are three that should be considered the fundamental building blocks of internal collaboration.

First, companies should analyze pre-existing forms of collaboration, no matter how flawed, to learn how employees collaborate currently. Simply talking to employees about the technologies, processes, and people they currently depend upon for collaboration will expose a variety of networks, both formal and informal, that employees already use. (continued…)

The dreaded intransigence of business silos! Okay, you’ve probably heard enough talk of this business quagmire. So instead of giving another boring explanation of how to break down business silos, let’s first take a look at some cartoons poking fun of the issue.

First off, let’s look at Davin Granroth’s cartoon and article: “How to seek and destroy organizational silos.”

David points out the nasty symptoms to look for when trying to spot an “evil silo”: lack of cooperation; breakdown in communication; and internal competition (employees looking “out for their own interests as opposed to the whole business’s interests”).

Then, we have Global Integration’s cartoon, which provides a representation of silos resulting from dispersed teams:

And finally, we have Daniel Vasconcello’s drawing paired with Larry K. Baxter’s article explaining departmental silos: how one “department may focus on itself, develop thick walls, look only up and not sideways, and avoid cooperation or even communication with other departments.”
Now that we’ve gone through that picture-book explanation, what are we really getting at? There are many solutions to breaking down silos, but I might as well talk about one I’m most familiar with: enterprise social networking. I may sound like a young idealist, but I truly believe enterprise social networking breaks down silos, increases innovation and makes work far more efficient and collaborative. (continued…)

The 2012 Fortune 100 lists Google as the number one company to work for—quite possibly because of the free food it offers employees—but, what else makes Google so appealing? Chief Culture Officer Stacy Savides Sullivan said Google’s core values from the beginning were to have “a flat organization, a lack of hierarchy, a collaborative environment.”

Flatter organizations—those with fewer levels of management—encourage employees to take initiative without needing approval from multiple managers. “Instead of “shifting the responsibility” up the management ladder, flat structures empower employees to take charge, help make decisions and feel responsible for the company’s success,” said Dana Griffin, from Demand Media. In order for this model to succeed, flat structures requires a fully competent staff with likeminded interest in the success of the company.

Employee retention is among some of the reasons why more businesses are trying to flatten their hierarchical structure. At TUCON, CIO Chris Robinson talked about why KPMG, a global audit and tax firm, wants to make their hierarchy flatter similar to Apple or Facebook’s organizational structures. KPMG experiences nearly 20 percent turnover in its global workforce every year. “A lot of people choose to leave any organization because of silos and hierarchy,” Robinson said. (continued…)

Companies continue to struggle with the fact that employees don’t know ‘who knows whom, who knows what, and ‘where to find content.’ To solve this, they have spent the past few decades deploying Intranets and document-centric portals, but years and millions of dollars later employees still aren’t finding the content they need fast enough with these tools.

Then one day Facebook and Linkedin came along and suddenly everybody in the world, with no training, is connected to their colleagues, knows what they’re doing and what they’re interested in. They’re instantly plugged in to the information they want from an easy-to-use application.

CEOs, COOs, CIOs, HR and Knowledge Management Executives want this sort of easy-to-access knowledge sharing within their company. The trick is it must be private. A private enterprise social network is now seen as the Holy Grail of collaboration—the killer productivity, mobility, and IP management solution companies have been looking for. They need to be able to manage their data in the cloud or in house, have it available on all devices and easily bring in information from their other business systems. It’s about more effectively engaging employees with one another and the information they need.

The value of social business is that with very little training, your employees will be connected to ‘who knows whom,’ ‘who knows what,’ and ‘what is where,’ from a browser window, their email or any mobile device. (continued…)

In The World in 2012, part of a series of annual publications by The Economist, Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, writes about the link between sharing and caring. You share photos of your kids because you’re motivated by the far-away grandparents who like to watch them grow up. You share because they care. Sheryl Sandberg’s argument is that social media flips the cause-and-effect and she outlines how you-care-because-they-share also holds true: compelling stories are brought to your attention allowing you to react and re-share with your social circles.

We like to draw attention to parallels between the world of social media and the application of social technologies in the enterprise. So how does this story fit into that picture? The answer is that it is just as compelling in the corporate world.

The first direction of causality is our traditional enterprise model. You share that project report because the stakeholders care about the project.

Enter the information-rich world of the modern enterprise where sharing is a by-product of work. Almost all events that are detected in systems of record emit a ping that gets channeled to the people who need to react to that event and those who want to know about it because they feel that it helps them make better decisions. (continued…)