Social Business Adoption - Where Do You "Work?"

As the suite of UC capabilities expands to incorporate social media capabilities, I was struck by an Information Week Analytics Survey on Social Networking in the Enterprise, which found that enterprise social networking is clearly not setting the world on fire. Only 13% of respondents ranked their internal social network capabilities as "excellent" and 25% called them "good" leaving 62% that ranked them "average," "fair," or "poor." The only feature on internal social networking initiatives, that had significant usage was "Online Profiles" being cited by 53% of respondents with "Team or Company Wikis" coming in second at 37% and "Company Discussion Forums" ranking third with 30%.

The most telling comment came from one senior IT director who said, "We have tried for over four years to push social networking in the enterprise. People just view it as one more place to have to look to get information." That observation might hold to key to why these social initiatives are failing to gain traction and what it might take to turn that situation around.

Speaking at Lotusphere in Orlando last month, Michael Chui, Senior Fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute, stressed the importance of adapting our tools to the changing nature of work. Chui talked about the move to "learning enterprises" and the role that social tools can play in bringing about that transformation. The key point he made was that social programs are not a "fire-and-forget" initiatives, but programs that require ongoing maintenance with a goal of integrating social into business processes; that clearly jives with UCStrategies definition of UC as "Communications integrated to optimize business processes."

While our definition of UC can encompass initiatives like communications enabled business processes, what we term "UC for Business Productivity" (UC-B), it also relates to the process of knowledge workers simply doing their jobs and the tools they use for that. In my workday, I cycle among a limited group of core applications, but for communications, I "work" in Entourage (i.e. the Mac version of Outlook).

The UC vendors have done a fairly good job at integrating access to the full range of communications (voice, video, email, and text) and collaboration (audio/video/web conferencing and screen sharing) in that "email" client along with access to the directory, calendar, and the other elements that knowledge workers depend on. However, if the social tools are "somewhere else," there's a good chance people aren't going there. About the only UC vendor that has fully embraced the integration of social is IBM in their Connections offering.

That "somewhere else" factor is one of the big reasons I'm not a major Facebook or LinkedIn user - I don't "go there." My son (and my wife for that matter) are the other way around. To my knowledge, neither of them use a true "email" client, but rather depend on the web client to do email. They "live" (I seem to be the only one who's "working" around here) in Facebook. It also helps that there are great Facebook apps for their iPhones. I had to dump the Facebook and LinkedIn apps off my BlackBerry so I could fit my whole address book on there. It turns out that BlackBerry only stores apps and contacts in main memory not on my nearly empty 16G SDI card I have, so you have to periodically do app "triage" and neither Facebook nor LinkedIn made the cut last time around.

So what might be necessary to spur enterprise social networking adoption is a change of venue for where knowledge workers do their work, or the incorporation of those social capabilities in the apps where they do work. Of course, everyone is going to tell you "people don't like change," which is clearly not true. Many (I'd argue "most") people will change and change willingly if they see a benefit to be had. Without a doubt the phenomenal adoption of smartphones and apps (none of which existed a few years ago) is an ample testament to the fact that people do change to things that appeal to them. Hence the wisdom of Michael Chiu's observation that social networking is not a "fire-and-forget" initiative.

For VARs, this holds two big lessons. First, the reality is that even if IT departments don't always recognize it, businesses are changing and there is real value to be had in incorporating the social elements of UC; that recognition should be included as part of the value proposition for the overall move to UC. Collaboration may provide a "quick payback" (particularly if we can reduce dependence on external conferencing services like InterCall and Premier Global), but the long-term value of business transformation is tied to social.

Second and even more important is the need to stress the requirement for resources to market these capabilities to users and training to ensure that they are adopted. The strategy of simply "making them available" isn't working. Of course, developing those marketing and training programs can result in increases professional services fees.

Those lessons will also hold true for IT departments who might find their relevance decreasing if they fail to enable the move to social. If the millennials find that IT is not providing the tools that are relevant to the new style of work, they'll start adopting consumer social tools in the business environment and we'll quickly go from "bring your own device" to "bring your own application."