RSS feedsA few months ago the IWR blog carried a post about nasty goings-on at a social software service. It had asked users for their email address and password so that it could reveal who in their address book was also using the service. A lot of people who should have known better duly handed over their details. Having been told who the overlapping users were, they were then outraged to find that the company promptly spammed everyone else in their address books.
This story brings home the point that not everyone in the social networking space is friendly. And, given the pressures for social networking activities to be allowed inside companies, the IT department, and anyone else involved, needs to go into this with their eyes open.
The traditional IT approach of “just say no” may seem justified when it comes to protecting the company from risk, but it is incredibly short-sighted. If an organisation can gain benefits from social networking, then IT should be right in there examining the options and helping to arrive at the correct strategic and technical decisions. This article will concentrate on social computing behind the firewall and how the user community and the IT department can work harmoniously.
Two-way web
Enterprise social computing is the best phrase to describe what we’re talking
about here: connecting and collaborating activities within an organisation that
are supported by IT.
Such initiatives may include blogs, wikis, instant messaging, tagging, linking, searching, RSS, mashups, widgets and many other things, all of which have been covered in IWR and its blog over the past few years. And, of course, the hard to pin down but you know it when you see it phenomenon of Web 2.0.
This is sometimes called the two-way web because it is snappy, responsive and designed for user participation.
These are the tools and conventions that bring a social networking complex into being. But none of them is the reason why an organisation gets into social computing. To be successful, an implementation needs to be driven by business needs.
Unfortunately, these cannot always be articulated in a traditional fashion. It’s difficult and probably pointless trying to write a statement of requirements, to be followed by a procurement process, then the final decision of whether to develop or buy in. By the time all that’s been worked through, the enthusiasm and momentum will have evaporated.
Lee Bryant is a man who knows his way around the social computing space. He co-founded Headshift, a social software consultancy that counts among its customers half of the top 10 global law firms and three of the top five consultancies.
Bryant is familiar with the issues for organisations that wish to embark on enterprise social computing initiatives. For a start he suggests that initiatives are most successful wherever work is knowledge-intensive or where good peripheral awareness is important. This awareness might be of the company, the market it operates in or even a particular department. For example, in large legal firms it exposes and helps join up related activities.
Usually Headshift is approached by heads of knowledge management, library services or communications. They generally express their wishes in terms of outcomes, blissfully unencumbered by any knowledge of IT. They usually want something more substantial than a small pilot but they want to work through any issues and get it running successfully before approaching the IT department for a wider roll-out.
Headshift determines the business case and grounds it in realistic objectives. The criterion for success is less likely to be return on investment than something more measurable, such as time saved or time to execute. Bryant asks clients “what’s measurable?” and uses the answer as the yardstick. In a law firm, for example, “time” can fairly easily be converted to billable hours.
More importantly, perhaps, is the building of what Bryant calls “a corporate immune system”. Once a social system is implemented, a corporate knowledge base and a web of relationships is automatically captured and stored. This recorded collective intelligence is a valuable enough resource for any company but an essential one for organisations that are subject to regulatory scrutiny.
By now, it’s clear that some externally hosted social software systems are potentially dangerous. Some, such as wiki/blog providers Socialtext or Atlassian are run professionally and the risks are low. Some have open source or server appliance versions that you can run in-house. Others claim perpetual beta status so that you can’t moan when they go down or cancel your account.
Picking your way among providers has to be done carefully. If you use external hosts, then you have to make sure that all your information is on tap and integrated where appropriate. Doing this with multiple service providers is difficult, if not impossible, in any meaningful way. Indeed, as Microsoft’s proposed purchase of enterprise search company Fast suggests, it’s a tough proposition even when your company controls all the software and data elements.
Crudely stated, the main choice seems to be to go with a leading-edge hosted service or wait for your preferred supplier to catch up. In between you have appliance or open source software that you can run internally and integrate with your preferred supplier, or your supplier can open up its own software to allow access to externally hosted services. Little wonder that IT folk want to play safe.
Bryant says that a common expression when he starts talking to IT is: “We’re a Microsoft shop.” It drives him nuts. He tries to say: “No, you’re a leading professional services firm.” Or whatever. His aim is to try and get IT to remember who it exists to serve. And if its objectives are all determined by its preferred vendors, their software and their development tools, then it is unlikely to be responsive to the company’s social computing needs.
He cites the IT man who said: “Lawyers wouldn’t use a wiki.” It’s an “IT knows best” mindset that is inappropriate these days. Bryant points out that, in that particular case, the IT man was completely wrong. Wikis are a popular and highly valued resource among law firms.
Bryant believes that IT is undergoing a major sea change. He reckons it’s 20-30% through at the moment. First, there’s the plumbing the underlying hardware and software that cannot stop. Then IT needs to professionally manage systems like ERP, payroll and suchlike. The final responsibility is to serve the lines of business.
The emphasis shifts towards individual departments for leadership, with IT playing more of a supporting role. Along with this, he advocates that IT promises “best endeavour” support with no guarantees. At this level, IT and the user department work closely together, with users taking more responsibility in exchange for more freedom to determine the applications they use.
Social interface
If they’re any good, as well as empathising with users and understanding the
range of social computing opportunities, these level-three folk will be familiar
with the Web 2.0 technologies which enable them to get at deep information
inside the organisation. They can mediate user access to the back-end systems
(ERP, CRM, and so on) by providing a social interface that makes it easier to
get data in and out of them.
There is no question that most modern social software is much easier to use than traditional applications and portals. And it can release value which might be locked away or difficult to reach inside legacy information systems.
Bryant believes there are three kinds of IT people: the ones who want to get involved in Web 2.0 and social computing; the bureaucrats; and tho ones who are “ideologically wedded to the traditional approach”, who can’t see a new requirement without wanting to develop a solution from scratch for compliance with .NET, SharePoint or other favoured environment.
Bryant reckons that about 30% of IT folk live in each category. Couple these remarks with the earlier ones about layering IT and it may be that each type has a meaningful role to play in this evolving new world.
Sticking with the last layer, the “line of business” one, the approach is close consultation with users, rapid development, feedback and iteration. It requires greater social skills and more up-to-date computer skills than are common in IT departments. The IT professionals need to be willing to tackle problems without framing everything in terms of existing tools.
Projects are typically three months long with a six-month maximum. Design, implementation and improvement all go on at the same time. Roll-out is usually within a department but, once everyone’s happy, wider deployments are sought. Conventionally, that’s when IT gets involved. But, under the evolving IT structure, they could be engaged from the start, improving the chances of success when the time comes for a wider deployment.
Many social computing evangelists regard IT as the enemy, to be avoided at all costs. In the real world this is neither possible nor desirable. Some IT people joined the profession to be creative and were subsequently disappointed with the reality of the work. Far better, then, to make sure that some of these lost souls are tasked with creating new value for the organisation through intelligent implementation of social computing systems. They will have the tools to make user engagement with IT systems more attractive and more meaningful, thereby making their working lives more fulfilling.
At the same time, providing the application areas are well chosen, they will be able to deliver better value to the organisation.
Let’s leave the final word to Lee Bryant: “Overall, the revolution in enterprise social tools promises to make IT more useful, more relevant and closer to real business needs. Surely this is good for IT professionals, rather than just posing a threat to their comfortable and unchallenged position as managers of the machines.”
FROM SKUNK WORKS TO BOXED TOOLS
Most pioneering social networking activities inside organisations are
done by a “skunk works”, probably well away from IT.
The BBC is a classic example. Its internal digital technology assessment department stuck a server in the corner of a room into which, over time, it installed a bulletin board system, a profile directory, blogging and wiki software.
Take-up was enthusiastic and dialogues started between people who hadn’t previously been aware of each other’s existence. Interest groups and networks of like-minded individuals evolved. Blogs and wikis followed and, more recently, BBC employees have started to use Facebook.
Today, the general benefits of social networking are better known although they don’t apply to all BBC departments or employees equally.
That said, large software vendors like Microsoft and IBM are in no doubt of the value, and they use many of the tools and techniques extensively inside their own organisations. Over time, more and more social computing facilities will surface in their products.
At the moment, a full enterprise social computing implementation would need to be either wholly sourced from social computing startups or be a mixture of the traditional vendors, with the gaps plugged by the newcomers.
Microsoft, for example, partnered with Newsgator for its RSS expertise and integration with calendars and documents in SharePoint.
All Information management technology
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