Perspectives & Strategy

Over the past few years I have gone through  a personal discovery process in respect of the use of Social Media within the workplace. What used to be almost universally banned as a diversion from real work is now becoming demanded within the workplace.

It has become evident that social medial is no longer simply about chatting with friends and having fun. In fact people are now demonstrating their thoughts and feelings about a wide range of topics from Iran to the colour of their next handbag. Tastes, preferences and values are all being publicly displayed as users build a community and share their thoughts. If views are publicly available then they can be analysed. With all this information this can be a boon for product planning and marketing.

Businesses are also getting involved in Social Media in order to:

• Build trust based networks
• Collaborate with customers, vendors, and others
• Identify opportunities for growth.

Social Media can be viewed by many as the current must-have, but at what cost to the corporation? Are CIOs setting aside the ROI in order to jump start their enterprise social media presence?

On the surface social media tools promise to connect the unconnected, but do they? In many corporations less than 100% of all workers have access to a PC, and many roles possibly will never include any factory worker access to computers, yet those workers still make a valuable contribution to the corporation. Because of the implementation of Instant Messaging (not strictly web 2.0 but it does show the benefits of on-line collaboration) in one corporation a warehouse supervisor spotted a potential error in a customer’s delivery allocation that saved thousands in extra trucking costs – solved by Instant Messaging whilst the department manager was in a meeting and traditionally unavailable.

Contrary to Elizabeth Bennet’s opinion in Feeling the Fear (CIO Insight June 2009) I believe that information sharing tools like wikis, video casts, and blogs can certainly contribute to a transformation of corporate behaviour. An ability to put information, instructions, training material into a wiki or a blog is of great importance. It takes on-line training one step further because the material was written by someone inside the organisation, and may even be someone the user knows.

To say that an organisation is late for the Web 2.0 party is a bit of a misnomer as there is no fixed time by which all corporations have to be compliant.  For some business and IT Leaders there is a tendency to panic once a need is discovered. That panic is based on the (often perceived rather than real) fact that all my competitors are using it and we are not, yet that can lead to a poorly thought out solution that causes more problems than it solves.

I have heard it said that it is not possible to identify an ROI for collaboration improvements and that we only see the real improvements in the rear-view mirror. Yet when I look back over my career this has always been true for any systems implementation. Defining an ROI for any proposed solution is about producing a best estimate  available at the time the need is perceived. That is as relevant for any Social Media implementation as it is for any other corporate change. Remember here the major impact of social medial is more in the area of business than with the technology that underpins it.

Internally setting up of blogs and wikis has more challenges in respect of obtaining contributions that it does with the technology setup. People are keen to initially get involved, but keeping contributions coming after the initial setup is even more vital. This is where the real work occurs in the building of any corporate knowledgebase. Sharing needs to be encouraged through the organisation. This requires a change in mindset, yet many people are already willing and have skills to do it because of their ability to contribute to discussions on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social networks.

I am not going to enter the realm of the impact on the corporate psychology of collaboration, that in outside the scope of this article. The whole area of social media is always questioned as to whether contribution in the area of social computing (e.g. blogs, wikis, social networks) whether internal or external constitute real work. This argument must be a part of the ROI for Social Media.