I talked to some corporate Yammer, Chatter and Jive users, all of whom claimed measurable gains from these tools in a variety of areas. Here are seven ways they derive value from social enterprise applications.
Ashley Furness identifies seven usage patterns for enterprise social software tools. However, she also highlights that some firms are reporting they can be ‘more “of a distraction” than a value driver’. Certainly that’s a danger of randomly implementing tools.
In the early days of Enterprise 2.0 (mid-2000s) enterprise social software was good at toolkit-style functionality. Blogs and wikis gave people useful frameworks and reference materials for doing bespoke tasks. But there wasn’t much functionality for businesses that run a lot of routinized process.
These early tools appealed to high-end consultancies, law firms, PR agencies, and tech startups, which lean towards more bespoke activities. I suspect that’s where people first got the idea that enterprise social software was for “knowledge workers.”
But social software has changed, and changed fast. In the past year, business has started to embrace social software for more routinized processes as well.
Michael Idinopulos highlights an important misconception that enterprise social software is only useful for certain industries or white collar professionals. I agree also that associating these technologies tightly with the concept of the knowledge worker also adds confusion (for the record, I’ve never agreed that Enterprise 2.0 was the evolution of KM).
I’ve certainly come across a number of examples in my own work this year that break that traditional view of where and how we apply these technologies. But, I also think we have barely scratched the surface.
I draw encouragement from the non-profit sector where we can more easily see evidence of service (re)design and social innovation at work. Examples such as the LIFE Programme and Patchwork show there is potential for a much richer dynamic that can impact the fundamentals of how we use IT to support people inside critical or complex business processes when they are working at scale. In fact, this goes beyond Idinopulos’ call to integrate the common enterprise social software patterns of activity stream and wikis – the focus is really about humanising IT systems.
Just as they are emerging in the non-profit sector, there are opportunities for the profit making enterprise to do the same in their respective domains. But they will only get there if we address the underlying misconceptions about social software and narrowing the use case to supporting the classic, office-based knowledge worker.
The short answer is yes, viral adoption can work BUT only in certain situations. This is my attempt to pin down some of the factors I’ve observed out in the field…
…these are the anti-patterns I’ve actually seen:
Posted over on the Headshift | Dachis Group Asia Pacific blog.
the idea of creating Facebook for the Enterprise remains a strong metaphor for senior management when they first try to articulate the need for a better way for staff to communicate and collaborate. Rightly or wrongly, the reality is that they don’t really want Facebook inside their organisation; but they do want the social software patterns that it embodies.
Cross posted from the Headshift | Dachis Group Asia Pacific blog.
I received a late Christmas present in the mail from the Tactical Technology Collective today, as a follow up to the Participatory Design Conference seminar I attended a few weeks back on turning information into action. The TTC support NGOs, human rights advocates, independent journalists and community associations involved with advocacy projects around different issues.
My first impressions of the toolkit samples are that I love the attention to detail in the presentation – I think it highlights the thought and care that has gone into preparing the information that these toolkits contain.
I’ll describe them in more detail when I get the chance. However, in the meantime you can also access these materials online.
I usually dodge questions about specific vendors and their offerings, and instead answer how I’d look at any particular deployment of collaboration software to see if it met my definition of Enterprise 2.0.
I find this pretty easy to do. I check to see if the environment meets three criteria: Is it freeform? How frictionless is contribution? And is it emergent?
It worth considering Andew McAfee’s criteria for Enterprise 2.0 software – particularly as we get excited about the potential for Sharepoint 2010 for example. However, we actually need to apply this criteria twice. Once to determine if the software’s architecture is able to support an Enterprise 2.0 use case, the second to determine if the organisation will actually deploy it in a way that allows those capabilities to be utilised.
Hat tip to Martin Koser.
Government 2.0 has seven main characteristics:
- It is citizen-driven.
- It is employee-centric.
- It keeps evolving.
- It is transformational.
- It requires a blend of planning and nurturing.
- It needs Pattern-Based Strategy capabilities.
- It calls for a new management style.
Without access to the research note, its a little hard to know exactly what Gartner analyst Andrea DiMaio means by this list of characteristics – particularly her his point about ‘Pattern-Based Strategy capabilities’.
However, its interesting to note that we have also proposed a pattern-based approach for one of the Government 2.0 Taskforce projects we (Headshift) are currently working on.
In the Toolkit Blueprint we talk about two types of patterns:
To us, a pattern-based approach makes a lot of sense as a way of dealing with the complexities of applying Web 2.0 tools to online engagement. I wonder if this is similar to what Gartner means too?
No, this isn’t a product endorsement 😉
However, the Drupal crowd make a lot of noise in my online neighbourhood and have been getting some good press coverage recently. So, this new Drupal-based intranet package caught my attention today. However, its not the fact that its Drupal powered that interests me, but more the pattern of features in it. Open Atrium includes features such as a dashboard home page, wiki pages, blogging, editing, project spaces, private microblogging (Twitter-style status alerts) etc. This is of course a very similar pattern to what we have already seen emerge in products like Thought Farmer, Social Text and Confluence – and even to an extent SharePoint (with the right Webparts and 3rd-party extensions of course) and IBM Lotus Connections (when partnered up with the right wiki solution).
There is a growing gap between these wiki- or collaboration-centric “suites” and information structure and publishing workflow centric web content management systems that have been the bread and butter of large corporate intranets.
Records management and enterprise content management is probably the one big omission in these new Intranet 2.0 suites, with products like Alfresco being one of the few to bridge both worlds with its Share module. However, out of the box Share lacks some of the richness of the other solutions out there.
If people really want strong document management features in their wiki suite then the open standard Content Management Interoperability Services (CMIS) should make it achievable in the future. But I think the trick is that there needs to be demand for this type of integration to be made available… and being tired with the constraints of old publishing-centric intranets, I don’t hear many people calling out very strongly for that just yet. The reality is that those people who are adopting the new style of intranet suites want to use them as a work platform, not a place for managing content for the sake of it.
James Dellow's Blog Archive 