Enterprise 2.0 practitioners realise this…
Social tools need to align with clear needs of the business and employees so they help people work better. Simply installing social networking software and telling people to use it may create no value at all.
The flexibility of social tools is a boon and a challenge: While the tools can be adapted in infinite ways to support different processes & needs, that lack of inherent structure leaves people feeling unclear about how to use the tools.
It’s important to start with the business needs and then see how the available tools can be used or designed to meet those needs.
It’s also important to remember that by giving every employee a face and a voice and then listening, a company’s leadership can increase employee engagement. This often has positive effects on the bottom line. The vague “employee engagement” value of a social intranet is hard to quantify, but still very important.
- Ephraim Freed
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Are social computing providers mindful of the landscape?
Stop ‘doing things’ to people and start to work together
An observation of employee engagement
Ask the pain point and deliver the contextual medicine
The right solution for the wrong problem
People need ownership to be motivated (see more links here about ownership and belonging)
Enterprise 2.0 - Two anecdotes that focus on a pain points (this post includes many links about responding to business problems. There’s no enterprise 2.0 strategy, there’s only business problems which you respond to with new tools and approaches)
No one (okay, almost no one) expects that buying a word processor can turn him into a great writer. Yet somehow it’s almost widely assumed that deploying tools labeled E2.0 would turn an organization into an E2.0 business. Which couldn’t be further from the truth. Despite all the buzz, E2.0 is first of all a set of principles, not software bits. It is more about business practices and human behaviors than about features. Software with strong social computing capabilities makes it much easier to establish and maintain these practices, but it doesn’t create them on its own, nor does it sustain them.
All businesses have to deal with things like customer support, supply chain management, R&D and product distribution. Who makes all these things happen? People. Now, what E2.0 is all about? In essence, it’s about people connections, just like any of its 2.0 siblings. And with the right focus, any business function can benefit from better connections.
For years IT lifecycles have been about planning, deploying and operating. Whether you were rolling out a review tool or a new accounting package, worrying about its adoption was simply not on your to-do list. You plan it well, you deploy – and then you’re in maintenance mode. But when it comes to social business software, deployment is just an initial step on what may become a long and rocky road. And if you’re not thoughtful about walking that road, it may lead to a rather daunting place where beautiful broadly available tools sit for months waiting for a single user to touch them. Having a social tool to solve a real business problem is necessary for long-term success…
Until now internal adoption of enterprise software followed one of the two simple models:
- Users have no choice (desktop OS, e-mail, payroll, etc)
- Users benefit from software regardless of its adoption by others (file sharing, internal portals, etc)
In the first case you get a speedy (though not always cheerful) 100% adoption, in the second case as long as the tool provides value, a simple awareness campaign leads to steady adoption growth. In contrast, adoption of social software happens in a dramatically different environment: typically users do have a choice, and the value they get out of the software depends on how many other people use it.
Enterprise social systems are typically complementary in their nature. Rarely – if ever – they are deployed as a direct replacement of an existing LOB application. They aim to improve connections, but truth is that in any functioning organization people already have some existing ways to connect and collaborate. So unless your new tool explicitly replaces an old one, it faces what every new start-up out there has to face: competition.
We’ve found that the key is to think like a startup, treating employees like customers and fully realizing that they had been taking care of their business before your solution existed, and will move on if you go bankrupt.
…social software is different from traditional IT. Traditional IT enables individuals to carry out well-defined, highly standardized transactions. Users go into the system to process transactions—to transfer funds, purchase supplies, track inventory, etc. The nature of these transactions, and the system’s ability to enable them, does not vary much according to the number of people using the system. Whether 100 people are entering orders or 10,000 people are entering orders, the transactions themselves doesn’t really change. What that means is that a representative small-scale sample is an accurate predictor of adoption and value at full scale.
But Enterprise 2.0 tools are different from traditional IT systems. Traditional IT enables transactions; Enterprise 2.0 enables interactions.
Interactions and transactions have completely different scale economics. When we use Enterprise 2.0, we’re not transacting with a system; we’re interacting with other people. An interaction is a connection between two or more nodes in a network. And as Metcalf’s Law famously states, the more people there are in that network, the more interactions each individual can have with his or her peers, and the more value that individual derives from participation in the network.
…their plan is to do the technology installation first and then train people to use it.
What often results, though, is the introduction of new ways of working that:
- Do not align with the way individuals currently work or even want to work
- Enforces a way of thinking of information that does not match the way people think about the information they use or want to use
The way to achieve this is to apply user-centred design principles:
- understand how people want to work and how they think about information
- design and identify tools that best align with workers thinking and behaviour
…influencing change relies on group dynamics and the ‘norming and forming’ processes. Teams often have special tasks that isolate them enough from the broader organisational hierarchy that they have their own social structure and practices, making them the perfect place to start introducing change.
If you can slowly amass enough support, particularly in the low-hierarchy team environment (one that is therefore more likely to adopt social computing tools) you can begin to introduce social computing behaviours and interactions, using these tools, as a group norm, and as a group norm, the group will eventually adopt the behaviour and reinforce that ‘this is the way we do stuff’.
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