PERF RMANCE 04 - The Performance Portal - Ernst & Young

Connection as competitive
advantage
The risks of the social
software-enabled enterprise
However exciting the convergence of social
and technological trends might be, there
are risks for both sides.
Any community initiative not positioned
correctly and championed by both formal
and informal leaders will be slow to achieve
a return on investment. Social initiatives
must be explicitly supported by the
hierarchy of leaders, from the executive to
the line management level. Just because
it’s “social technology” doesn’t mean
people will use it — the usual enterprise
change management rules apply, and
leadership support is often a crucial
constraint at the best of times.
The definition and modeling of desired
behaviors is another essential element.
One informal law often cited is that the
collaboration technology used in an
organization will default to the lowest
level of comfort of the most powerful
person in the collaboration — a correlation
also reflected in Burt’s research on social
structures and seniority (Burt, 1997).
Therefore, engaging credible leaders in
a visible manner in the initiative, and
equipping them to succeed, is one key step
on the path to success.
Non-verbal and behavioral cues have
always impacted human behaviors, and
perhaps even more so in a connected
organization. Resources need to be
made available to encourage risk taking,
boundary spanning (see Figure 3) and the
courage to innovate. Success stories need
to be harvested and told far and wide, using
all available channels, by leadership at
multiple levels in the organization.
The new capability from the social web
comes with a new set of user expectations.
If the community tool you launch internally
falls short of these user expectations, then
user adoption will be low. This means you
will have failed before you even started,
as low user rates means no network and
therefore no value to the organization.
Business and IT leaders need to have
frank discussions about how to balance
the needs of the user base to connect
and collaborate with the needs of the
organization. This will help to control costs
and keep technology portfolios in order.
Because the technologies involved can be
sourced from the internet with low startup
costs, many social-forward managers are
already piloting social business software
applications for various purposes.
The effect of this is a “traffic jam” of
disaggregated applications with no overall
strategy or link to your organization’s
enterprise architecture. If your goal is
an eventual enterprise-wide platform,
tread carefully, as each of these pilots is
an emergent community that must be
carefully and skillfully brought within the
fold. Do it wrongly and you risk creating
a hundred social brushfires from a wellnetworked
group of dissident employees.
To forestall this, focus on their needs early
and often, and integrate their requirements
wherever possible.
The technologies used both inside
and outside the organizational firewall
play a key role in connecting people,
but serious challenges associated with
adoption and productive use of such
tools is common. In fact, the very userfriendliness
of social tools produces one
of the greatest risks of this new toolset.
Without clear guidelines and governance,
technology-enabled communities have the
potential to create “shadow repositories“
of authoritative documents that may
be critical to organizational success.
Content management challenges, such as
document version control and adherence
to intellectual property rules, are emerging
as significant sources of risk to a firm’s
information architecture from improperly
governed activities on social business
software platforms.
Technology must be compatible with
employee workflow in a very pragmatic
way. Changes to well-entrenched
enterprise-wide process workflows are not
easily adopted. Training programs, even on
highly usable technologies, can play a key
role in change management efforts and
the achievement of organizational goals.
SharePoint 2007 has been deployed by
many clients for years as an enterprise
collaboration platform. However, basic
challenges of adoption and proper use still
remain at the individual and departmental
level, leading to a landscape of duplicate,
redundant and abandoned Sharepoint
sites — most of which could have been
avoided given more targeted investments in
embedding proper processes into employee
workflows around the Sharepoint platform.
In sum, these technologies stand poised
to deliver significant value to large
organizations — but offer significant risks
as well. A methodical current state analysis
can pay dividends in identifying current
organizational, cultural and governanceoriented
gaps, as well as illuminating
any social projects flying under the
radar for the purposes of evaluation and
engagement. Gaining this understanding
and engagement are crucial first steps on
the road to the social enterprise.
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