Genie in a Bottle

Organisations have tried to make manufacturing and office work as efficient as possible and off-shored whatever they can. Now it’s dawning on them that innovation offers the best way to improve margins. But innovation demands that people collaborate, and people are notoriously difficult to control. In fact, the more they feel they’re being controlled, the less innovative they’re likely to be.

Enter social computing. Wikis, blogs and RSS feeds have a proven ability to help people find others with common interests and enable them to communicate and collaborate with each other. However, inside business such an approach brings risks and often a high degree of scepticism on the part of management.

Most organisations are nervous about opening themselves up to the outside world in the way that IBM and Microsoft have, with staff being encouraged to blog to anyone who will listen. But many are also frightened of introducing social computing even within the confines of their own organisation.

Information World Review set out to examine the fears of those who had consciously turned their backs on social computing behind the firewall. The subject is about to be covered in a new one-day forum in London, the Blogs & Social Media Forum. 

Experienced observers advised us, and were proved correct, that companies would be unlikely to go on the record about their reasons for rejecting social computing. Instead, we spoke mainly to analysts, consultants and social computing adopters to identify the fears of business managers and staff. However, some significant patterns started to emerge in the reasons why bosses are rejecting social computing.

Losing control

Control, not surprisingly, was the number one concern of senior management. The introduction of social computing on a wide scale has the potential to shift the power structure of an organisation irreversibly. Suw Charman, who has been a social software consultant for the past two years, suggests that: “Some companies don’t want their employees to have a voice, to answer back or to question the management.”

Social software would inevitably subvert the hierarchy and staff would discover things that management would prefer to keep hidden.

Does this sound familiar? Telephone systems, PC networks and email were all perceived as similar threats in their time, yet with the right controls and policies, they eventually proved indispensable to business. The difference with social software is that communications are much less likely to be one-to-one. If someone blogs what’s on their mind, then anyone can read it.

What’s worse is that the outside world is only a copy and paste away. Leakage of essentially private information or opinion is a major concern for companies. Ray Jordan, corporate vice-president of public affairs and corporate communications at Johnson & Johnson, warns that: “An internal blog could contain project notes accessible by anyone in the company. This could inadvertently create inside information.”

Never trust an employee

This leads to another, which is about trust. Some organisations find it difficult to trust their employees to behave responsibly and not leak information or fritter time away when using these new systems. If companies are uneasy about employees chatting round the coffee machine or browsing external websites, then they are going to regard time spent socialising or doing ‘non-work’ things on the blogs and wikis as time wasting. According to Charman, small talk, whether physical or digital, is “the social glue that binds teams together.”

Jaap Favier, vice president and research director of Forrester Research, highlights another issue. “I’ve spoken to quite a lot of executive boards over the past few months and I started to see a very simple answer to why organisations aren’t looking at social computing,” he says. “It’s because senior executives are alpha males. Being in control is what they’re good at and what they like, which is what brought them to the board seat to begin with. Sharing power is not part of their genes.”

In such a situation, the organisation would probably be quite right to turn its back on wholesale social computing because, without senior management support, it’s unlikely to work in the long term. It might work in pockets, within existing communities of practice, for example, but it would not become part of the social fabric of the organisation without a cultural upheaval first.

Heard it all before

Even if a company has a fairly transparent culture, it may still be wary of introducing these new systems. The management is probably tired of hearing promises about improved productivity from an endless succession of software salespeople in the past. “Invest hundreds of thousands in this knowledge management system, it makes staff more effective and increases the organisation’s intellectual capital at the same time”. Except, very often, it didn’t work out that way. Fingers were burnt and budgets sacrificed.

Neil Macehiter, a partner in IT and business alignment advisory firm Macehiter Ward-Dutton and one-time Ovum analyst, points out that: “Knowledge management, collaborative software and intranets just didn’t move high enough up the corporate agenda. Significant investments were made and the hoped for returns didn’t materialise.” He suggests that: “Given all the other challenges facing enterprises, they have bigger fish to fry.”

Then there’s the cost/benefit ratio. Social software is inexpensive, but questions are still bound to arise around likely costs. Senior management and the IT department will be concerned about training costs and the likely hit on staff performance as new systems are adopted.

Another major management concern centres around the very persistence of social software records, especially blogs. Control of content is with the employees, bringing the risk of accidental regulatory infringements. In theory, if all staff abide by the organisation’s social computing guidelines, then this shouldn’t happen. But this returns to an earlier issue, that of trust. Can staff be trusted to only place compliant information into such permanent records?

Finally, the IT department is very likely to question why new, allegedly immature, software is needed when it regards existing systems as perfectly adequate. “You can’t discount the fact that other tools, such as distribution lists, shared folders and eRoom come close in functionality,” says Jordan.

The social software industry can address all these concerns for those willing to take the plunge. However, the widespread adoption of social software among knowledge workers is likely to result in a profound change in the way that the organisation operates. It definitely won’t suit everyone. “You just have to walk away from some organisations,” admits Charman.

Rejecting social computing

Then there’s the question of user refusal to adopt changes. Some staff will embrace these systems enthusiastically, while others reject them out of hand. The bottom line for staff is “what’s in it for me?”. If that question cannot be answered, then the systems will join expert systems, artificial intelligence and knowledge management on the scrapheap of corporate computing life.

Young people coming into work might wonder where the social software tools are. Certainly blogs and RSS are likely to be an integral part of their non-work lives. At the other extreme, older people will do their best to avoid learning new ways of working. Generally, though, people will perceive different threats from social software according to their role in the organisation.

Taking staff, as opposed to middle management, as the start point, they are likely to be afraid of the unknown, so their knee-jerk reaction will be to refuse to adopt it unless forced. Charman describes this as: “A Pavlovian response to new software conditioned by bitter experience.” And it’s understandable when past software implementations have just brought extra work and little direct benefit to users.

New systems of any kind involve a disruption of existing work practices and a negative impact on productivity in the short term. A typical response from one senior salesman in a large multinational was: “I try and do my job rather than keep up.” So inconvenience and, for sales people, a consequent loss of income is another fear.

In some organisations, both managers and staff are afraid of embarrassing themselves through the kind of exposure that social computing brings. Where a mistake or a revelation of ignorance was once limited to the recipient of an email, or an attendee at a meeting, a blog or a wiki receives much wider attention.
No-one wants to look a fool and the desire to ‘post perfectly’ is a huge inhibitor for some. This, of course, is impossible and impractical. The whole point of social software is that you refine information as a group.

Middle managers, in particular, feel the pressure to get things right. They are afraid of publishing information, then having their staff criticise it or discover flaws. This could damage their credibility both downstream and upstream, depending on the culture of the organisation.

Hierarchy anarchy

But these are the least of a middle manager’s worries. The danger of subversion is all around. Staff will bypass the hierarchy and the ‘official channels’ if it makes their lives easier. This has happened before, with emails, but you had to know who to reach out to. With social software, you can raise an issue and someone you’d never heard of could join the conversation. New cross-functional social networks will form without management’s say-so, or awareness.

Then you have the team leader who, in Charman’s words: “Wants to collect the Brownie points for getting things done, even when the work is a team effort.” This simply can’t happen in the open world of social computing. The processes in a wiki, for example, are there for all to see in the version history. Some ambitious team leaders might regard such openness as career-limiting.

As social computing becomes entrenched, a complementary power network emerges within the organisation. Charman describes the most powerful participants as ‘nodes’ and ‘supernodes’. These are incredibly well-connected people whose value to the community is enormous. If they advocate something, then word spreads rapidly.

They are often difficult to find, but they are essential to a successful implementation. On the other hand, if they are humble personal assistants, in terms of the official hierarchy, they could suddenly find themselves with more social influence than their own bosses, a potentially tension-inducing situation.

It’s clear to see why so many people fear social computing. It threatens the conventional power structure within organisations. It threatens those who value the status quo and consider existing collaboration software as good enough. But the change this time around is a qualitative one, less driven from the centre and more by the users.

If they discover value in social software, they will adopt it, providing the company allows it. And, in some cases, even if the company doesn’t, technically savvy users might set up an independent server (Charman called it a “Trojan mouse”) and provide blog, wiki and RSS capabilities for anyone who cares to participate.
Companies need to weigh up the benefits and disadvantages carefully. They will need to make an enlightened decision based on the nature of the business, its regulatory environment and its culture.

Al Tepper, head of online development at Caspian Publishing, warns anyone contemplating social software: “if you’ve got something to hide, you’ve got something to fear.” This is bad news indeed for those who maintain their position through manipulation, hoarding information or playing politics.

Once the social computing genie is out of the bottle, it can never be stuffed back in.

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