The reason for doing is because I think something a lot of people overlook is the composition of workforces. Advocates often argue that the real potential of ‘Enterprise 2.0’ is realised by rolling out social media freely across the workforce on a totally inclusive basis and letting people get on with it.
The problem, however, is that most employers rely on a high proportion of the workforce, those whose roles are very process and/or task oriented, just getting on with their job.
In case you are having trouble working out the use of percentages on this chart, what it is telling us is that in almost half of the organisations interviewed (a cross section of larger enterprises), fewer than one in four employees could be categorised as knowledge or information workers, i.e. the kind of employees for which a case might be made for improved collaboration.
For the remainder of employees, the potential distraction (equivalent to cost in business terms) of providing them with social media facilities is likely to far outweigh any potential benefits.
You can argue with this on idealistic grounds if you like, but if any social media advocate inherited control of a large enterprise and became immediately accountable for productivity, process efficiency, customer service and, ultimately, profitability, would they really be willing to take hit?
So, the takeaway here is to be realistic about the scope of your ambition for social media in a business context and be really quite selective about where you choose to roll it out. And if you do decide to go for it, then approach any initiative objectively. For more thoughts on this, see my article entitled 'Collaboration - get it together' published a little while back on Silicon.
3 comments:
I disagree with your conclusion that because few companies self-identify their workforce as mostly knowledge workers it is unwise to deploy social media freely across an enterprise.
There are two assumptions that I think are wrong with your conclusion. The first is that only 'knowledge workers' need improved collaboration tools. The second is that Enterprise 2.0 tools add to work rather than increasing productivity.
On the first point, Pew Internet says 62% of working public has email at work. Knowledge worker or not these employees are already using a 'collaboration tool' provided by the company - email. There are at least two parties to any collaboration - and the other 'party' might well including employees who aren't knowledge workers.
I also disagree that social media tools are implicitly a distraction from people getting their job done. Done correctly, Enterprise 2.0 tools can get people out of a poor collaboration tool (email) and into a better one (ie a wiki). Productivity risk is true of any IT system not just Enterprise 2.0 ones - I can think of a plenty of corporate systems that hurt rather than helped productivity.
This controlled roll out may hedge against productivity loss for the audience you described, but it is counter intuitive to the collaboration process and therefore does not allow for the greatest return on that investment in the first place. To me the impact Enterprise 2.0 can have on innovation and collaboration when running full steam at its greatest potential will certainly out weigh any of the negative impact described here.
Thanks for the comments Paula and Jron.
To Paula: if you are challenging the figures, then fine, it was only a 200 organisation study I was quoting, and there is clearly a margin for error. Of course the reality is also that we are talking about a spectrum, from highly collaborative folk at one end, through process workers who 'collaborate' (e.g. using email) to coordinate and troubleshoot on routine transactions in the middle, to those who you really want to just get on with doing what they are instructed to do at the other extreme.
If you run through this spectrum, and think in terms of the value you are paying workers to deliver (in whatever form), then I don't think it takes much working out that Enterprise 2.0 is likely to represent a value boost at one end and a distraction at the other. If you dispute this, then we will have to agree to differ, though I would be interested in how you rationalise your view - e.g. if you are paying someone for data entry work, let's say they spend 8 hours a day transcribing information from paper forms into a computer system in a high volume environment, their use of social media will almost certainly be a net distraction - won't it? When considering this, it is important to focus on the norm rather than the exception BTW.
Turning to your point about specific tools, we need to be careful not to confuse the use of things like wikis with ‘real’ interactive collaboration. Clearly there is a correlation here when such tools are used in highly collaborative groups, but wikis are often best thought of as a way for a few key/proactive people to maintain reference information, tips, tricks, etc for the majority who will consume the output (as a page on the intranet) but would never dream of contributing - and again, it is arguable whether you would want them to contribute in many cases from a business perspective.
This brings me on to Jron's point challenging the principle of objective and controlled rollout. While I appreciate the theory of 'build it and they will come, collaborate, innovate, etc', I have seen absolutely no convincing case studies that demonstrate the value of this approach, apart from in very small companies with the pre-requisite culture. When I read accounts of successful social media adoption in an enterprise context, they are always referring to targeted deployments, generally with an aim to driving better productivity in a process context (e.g. customer service). And yes, I did say productivity - innovation is typically not top of the list of motives for deployment of improved collaboration facilities, whether Enterprise 2.0 or in the broader sense (we have lots of data on this).
And on my favourite topic of objectivity, asking the question "What's the value of Enterprise 2.0?" is akin to holding the telescope the wrong way around. The more useful questions are ones like "How can I improve the way people work together in my key processes to drive productivity, reduce cycle times, and improve service levels?" and "How can get people sharing, developing and challenging ideas in key groups to drive innovation and continuous improvement?".
If you ask the questions in this much more objective way (obviously in the context of key processes and groups), then you can offer up the various tools to see how they fit. In some cases, email will be perfectly adequate. In others, adding a real time element through simple IM will boost performance. Beyond this, it is not just about considering social media as purists would define it, but facilities such as mobile technology, unified communications, even simple structured document management! To put it another way, social media is just one tool in the box when looking to get people working together more effectively and efficiently to drive business performance improvements.
So, Paula and Jron, I need you to get a lot more specific about scope and practicalities if you are going to change my assessment - which, BTW, is consistent with the assessment of the majority of business and IT decision makers out there according to our research - even those who have successfully driven adoption of social media to one degree or another in their organisations.
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