Social computing in the enterprise

The power and popularity of Wikipedia, Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook, and other Web 2.0 solutions have caused enterprises to consider the benefits of implementing these solutions internally. Whether the end goal is better expertise location, improved collaboration, an edge in recruiting and retention, or capturing knowledge from retiring workers, enterprises are realizing social computing software has a place in the enterprise. While internal social computing deployments tend to be in the early stages in many companies, the pace of adoption has accelerated sharply in the last 12 months, and this growth is anticipated to continue.

NewsGator has been fortunate to work with several leading-edge companies and thinkers on enterprise social computing. These early adopters have reaped rewards and learned lessons while traveling down the social computing trail.

Recruiting, Retaining & Retiring
“Generation Y” workers are already using social computing tools. These tools have been an important part of their existence for years now, and this trend is only getting stronger. According to Wikipedia’s January 2009 numbers, Facebook is estimated to have approximately 175 million active users. Providing tools and working environments that match their prior experience is an important part of recruiting and retaining these workers.

A manager from a large consumer products company recently told us the story of a new employee who put his company-issued laptop in a drawer in his desk and had it forward all his email to an external service. Then he used his own computer and only web-based tools to do his actual work. Clearly this is at the edge of user behavior, but the basic fact is that workers tend to solve problems in the ways that are most obvious to them.

If the company-provided tools do not meet the workers’ needs, they will find other ways. Generation Y workers already know lots of web-based ways to solve problems. Having good social computing tools not only helps with recruiting and retaining these workers but also helps to ensure that business processes happen through the company’s business systems instead of some external web service.

At the other end of the spectrum, most companies have a significant number of retiring workers who have substantial knowledge about how the company really gets things done. They know the “whys” of the current practices and processes and that knowledge is incredibly valuable. A recent survey shows that 53% of companies in the Oil and Gas Industry see aging workers are retiring in greater numbers (Microsoft/Accenture, February 9, 2009). Many companies have tried “knowledge management” initiatives over the years that have failed because they require far too much effort to capture the knowledge.

Expertise Location
If you work for a company with more than two hundred employees, it’s nearly guaranteed that you’ve asked “Who knows about X?” sometime in the past few months. Among our larger customers and prospects, expertise location is the most common reason for implementing social computing solutions. The time spent trying to find an expert is expensive. And having multiple workers solving the same kinds of problems without the knowledge of a real expert can be even more expensive.

Social computing solutions make expertise location markedly simpler because working within social tools creates metadata that identify experts by their actions without requiring them to complete some sort of skills survey. Also, communities of users are very effective for providing an assessment of credibility. Just like the seller ratings on eBay provide a quite accurate tool for assessing the seller’s authenticity, explicit or implied credibility ratings in a social computing tool spotlight expertise.

Innovation
The majority of companies we deal with rely significantly on innovation to compete. Consumer packaged-goods companies, for example, rely on creating several new products each year that can rise in sales to the stature of their current brand leaders in order to meet their company growth goals. Social computing tools help innovation directly by connecting both people and concepts that would otherwise be separated by geography or organizational boundaries. While anecdotal, it’s also important to note that many of the most innovative companies in the world have a distinct sense of “play” in their culture. Clearly, not all companies can embrace Nerf-gun wars in the cubicles, but social computing tools do bring a sense of fun to the work environment.

Collaboration
While collaboration can clearly be done by emailing a document among co-workers, the tools of the Web 2.0 world work better in many instances. Today, email is often the default “collaboration” tool simply because it is available. Email has its place, and we will talk more about how it fits in the implementation process, but clearly there are many kinds of discussions and collaborative work that are better done outside of email. A Baseline article (Social Software’s Culture Clash – February 21, 2008) lists a 25% reduction in email attachments at one company and a 10% increase in productivity at another company based on implementing wikis. Reducing the friction of getting the work done through better tools not only improves efficiency, but also has a powerful cultural effect that supports the recruiting and retention goals.

Identity & Recapturing Social Network Time
Establishing identity is a basic human need. While this may appear most dramatically on MySpace, where young teens pour out their feelings in their quest for self, many professional workers take pride in their LinkedIn profiles to a similar degree. In an era of uncertain company futures, a knowledge worker’s best asset is their identity which combines their connections, experience, and expertise. In 2008, Serena Software moved their intranet fully to Face book (Forbes, March 2009). Creating a place for workers to establish their identity within the company benefits them just as much as it benefits the company as a whole.

While it’s not yet clear that use of social computing tools in the enterprise will cause employees to stop establishing their identity and having discussions about the company externally, it certainly can’t hurt to give them the ability to do those things inside the firewall. The more subtle, yet almost certainly more powerful, effect is that these internal communities give workers more ways to attach to each other and the company.

When implemented correctly, internal social computing solutions will give employees some of those enjoyable serendipitous moments (like seeing a co-worker’s birthday or spotting some pictures of a company event) within the context of an actual workplace tool.

Companies are implementing social computing software for a variety of reasons. The success of these tools in the consumer space and the urgency of challenges like retiring workers or improving productivity have created a compelling need. Now many companies are focused on what business goals they want to achieve and are moving forward on implementation.
What Enterprise Social Computing Really Is.

“I want Facebook for the Enterprise”. Many conversations with companies that are beginning work on social computing start with a statement like that. It is exceedingly rare, however, that the business goals and correct implementation actually match such a statement. In most cases, statements like these are proxies for things like “I want rich user profile pages” or “I want intelligent filtering and recommending of content based on social context”.

All enterprise social computing solutions break down into individuals, groups, content, and the relationships among those three. The view of the person is central to social computing. A rich and dynamic representation of an individual creates a powerful “humanness” to the software as well as providing the actual business value for some scenarios. For example, if I’m looking for people who know about Microsoft Exchange Administration, I get a much higher sense of comfort if I see their profile contains both a listing of certifications and RSS feeds that they read about Exchange.

Groups provide another cornerstone element of social computing because they represent a set of individuals with some common interest, goal, or expertise. Groups provide both a powerful way of organizing to do work as well as helping to establish the identity of the individual. I get a far different sense about my Exchange person in the previous paragraph if I see he is a member of marketing-related communities versus if he has joined a group of network administrators.

Content includes the information that is not literally about the person or group. This includes discussions, wikis, documents, blogs, external news, video and much more. The RSS feeds that my Exchange person was reading and the discussion from his marketing community are great examples of content that have value in their own right but also help to further define the individual and the group. Content includes both the information created by the individuals in the system and external information, since the user’s interaction with external content also establishes his identity.

Blogs can be a great way to create content, but wikis or discussions are also effective. The right technology for user creation of content in this case has more to do with whatever is more likely to be adopted by your experts. Focusing on the user stories creates a much clearer picture of the right solution than taking a bunch of technologies and trying to figure out how to stick them all together.

Implementing an enterprise social computing solution requires both social/cultural (the “people part”) and technical steps (See Figure 2). The people aspects need to be considered first since they will dictate the key requirements and the adoption process. The technical portion comes down to implementing the right features in the right way to support the broader social picture and the business goals.

Before we dive into the implementation process, we need to look at the “hidden secret of Web 2.0 software”. The business benefits and the model shown above are not revolutionary. Adding a social aspect to what would have historically been termed “knowledge management” or “collaboration platform” solutions makes them more enjoyable and more effective.

The simplest example of this is tagging. When a user tags something, she gets the direct benefit of organizing the content for easier discovery and retrieval later. When done with a simple text box in an interface, tagging is exceptionally quick and simple. Most importantly, the act of tagging content not only makes that content more discoverable for all other users; it also helps to identify the interests and expertise of the person who tagged the content.

How to implement?
Implementing an enterprise social computing solution requires both social/cultural (the “people part”) and technical steps. The people aspects need to be considered first since they will dictate the key requirements and the adoption process. The technical portion comes down to implementing the right features in the right way to support the broader social picture and the business goals.

According to a recent white paper from McKinsey the 6 factors to a successful Enterprise 2.0 implementation are (The McKinsey Quarterly, March 2009):
• The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top
• The best uses come from users, but they require help to scale
• What's in the work flow is what gets used.
• Appeal to the participants' egos and needs, not just their wallets.
• The right solution comes from the right participants. 
• Balance the top-down and self-management of risk. 

NewsGator agrees to all these factors, as over the last few years we have seen these factors to be particularly true at all of our relations.

Conclusion
Before undertaking a social computing project, consider your company’s goals – that is the business problems you are trying to solve or the business needs you are trying to satisfy. After defining the business problems and needs, select the appropriate social computing elements to meet your goals. Establish an implementation plan that considers both social/cultural (people) and technology components. Finally ensure that upper management supports and help push the culture shift in the organization.

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