Is enterprise social adoption suffering jack of all trades, master of none

It’s been extremely difficult to get meaningful adoption for end users when the application doesn’t have business context

When  a customer buys a CRM software, it isn’t much of a leap to understand that the software is built around the core processes that they needed

Social software has been the white canvas where you’ve had to manufacture the use cases…prove to the customer…a wiki can help you in these six ways…a blog can help you in these three ways…whereas direct design has been solving business problems

SOURCE Sameer Patel

How do we provide a little bit of structure around collaboration…for those things you do most commonly…and those are things like creating an agenda, doing a pro con analysis, being able to rank things…those are all things that we do quite frequently, but right now most vendors just say throw it into a wiki, and that’s your answer…but when you are doing it that often you need something that helps jumpstart the process 

eg creating an agenda, weighing different options, ranking, timeline, decisions, tasks, polls

SOURCE Steve Hamrick

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.

SOURCE Ephraim Freed

…we should be deploying platforms and then treating them as a starting point for the development of smart, situated software that hone in on specific business needs.

SOURCE Lee Bryant (slide 16, 46)

NOTES

It was always said that we the users design how the social tools are used, not the vendor…which was quite different and really cool, as the more unstructured the tool, the more we can use them for a variety of purposes. But this ends up being a type of jack of all trades, master of none scenario…

When you mix that in with people used to software doing a specific thing and being trained on it, it’s no wonder adoption is low. It’s almost like people don’t make time to think of how they can use a tool, they just want to pick it up and the tool to tell them how to use it, which if designed for a specific purpose (and designed well) will do just that.

I always remember this insight from Yuri Alkin, and wonder that if social tools are more in a business context that they won’t need to be so much about adoption ie. the tools purpose and design will much more speak for itself:

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… 



More by Yuri…which surfaces the importance of these tools being design into a business context:

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.


For those of us who have watched enterprise social software progress, we really appreciate the concept of apps on a platform. My post from 2011 was all about apps that support specific business processes…apps that are simple designed to do just one thing…even better if users can build these apps. I gave examples of enterprise social tools going beyond microblogging, blogs, forums, wikis…and rather being more designed for a specific need. Once we needed to buy software for every business need, and it was always more sophisticated than we needed, costly, hard to integrate into existing systems, etc..Kickstarter is a really good tool that could be used in the enterprise, as is Zapproved…why can’t they just be built as apps on existing platforms.
This is why I like Podio, this is why I like SAP JAM’s inheriting structured collaboration tools from Streamworks.

I’ll say it this way:

Would you rather use a table inside a wiki to do a pro/con analysis, or would you rather use a designed tool to do that in a very intuitive way.

Would you even think to use a wiki in the first place to do a pro/con analysis? You might as well use MS Word.

Anyway, I always remember Stuart French’s pithy comment on my post:

Jackpot, Bingo and Bullseye all in one. Excellent post.

Thanks for the link to Podio. I can really see people (even those in ERP type environments) benefiting from small apps that solve small problems for them. Let them spread virally through the social networks of the firm and let everybody have an iPhone-style environment develop on their desktop with lots of mini-solutions that help them do their job the best way that suits them.

Bring it on!

Stu.


In closing I’m for a holistic approach that SAP JAM is not pioneering, but I’d say is championing.

Let us have our unstructured tools like the microblogs, blogs, forums, wikis…but also let us have more structured apps that do specific things (as opposed to try and force a wiki or blog to do it)….and of course let’s embed these social functions inside business contexts like CRM, ERP (this way people don’t need to shift context).

And like what portals did for dashboard’s or gateways pages to content that lives elsewhere…activity streams do for conversations.

Related

Enterprise 2.0 practitioners realise this…

A revisit to adoption of enterprise social networks

The future of enterprise 2.0 is apps

The integration of Enterprise Social Software

Social needs to turn up in the context of work

Social Business Is Neither A Vertical Nor A Horizontal Enterprise Service, But Both

Purposeful Collaboration

The new to overcome the old is an optical illusion