Chapter 16
The CIO Guide to Social Collaboration
In This Chapter
Understanding how to integrate your social collaboration solution
Evaluating the needs of users and the enterprise
Planning for long-term success
Charting your course for future integration
Understanding the importance of social collaboration tools
Technology leaders have the same interest in social collaboration as other executives: to help communicate, collaborate, and get the teams reporting to them functioning better. The emphasis in this chapter is on technology leadership strategies for using social collaboration, rather than the kind of tips on leading through social collaboration that I share in the preceding chapter. If you’re a chief information officer (CIO) or chief technology officer (CTO), read Chapter 15 because it applies to you, too. This chapter addresses the additional responsibilities you have that other executives don’t.
Regardless of whether the title is CIO, VP of IT, or some newfangled title like Chief Digital Officer, someone should be in charge of making sure the social collaboration platform is reliable, secure, and appropriately integrated with the rest of the organization’s technical infrastructure.
Integrating Applications and Organizations with Social Collaboration
Community managers and management consultants who advocate for social collaboration are fond of saying that the technology is the easy part — and maybe that’s just because it’s not the part they’re responsible for (I address their responsibilities in Part IV). Technology alone won’t create a successful social platform, but failure to make the right technology choices will limit the chance of success. Suppose the collaboration network goes offline when employees need it the most — or through some glitch, displays confidential information? If something like that happens on your watch, it could be time to polish your resume.
In general, social collaboration isn’t a high-risk proposition compared with many other technologies in your portfolio. And if it fails, it usually fails quietly with a whimper and not a bang. Success, on the other hand, requires thoughtful implementation and becomes more probable if the technology team has thought through the possibilities as well as the risks.
Issues to be addressed include
Security: Decide how users will be authenticated and data will be protected. You also need to consider how far the platform can be trusted to prevent unauthorized access and what that implies for what information will or will not be entrusted to it.
Identity management: Consider how the enterprise can provide a single, consistent employee online identity across social collaboration and other systems.
Knowledge management: Think about how you can preserve the best content from social collaboration as organizational knowledge for the long term.
Architectural quality: Focus on how you can maximize the lasting value of your social collaboration platform, rather than merely addressing tactical requirements.
The integration opportunity
One way of making social collaboration more useful is by integrating the collaboration platform with other applications. For example, you can add comment streams to records displayed in a CRM or supply chain system, allowing employees to add informal comments or easily share a link to a specific record with any other user on the social network — say, a “Hey, this is something you ought to look at” type of message that may be a heads-up on a problem or an opportunity.
At a basic level, a social post can link to any web resource available at a distinct web address. On Facebook and Google+, and in many social collaboration solutions, when you include a link to a file or video in a post, the software creates a preview of a document or a video. Creating an appropriate preview for a business application record is a little more complex because (understandably) you can’t have the system display information that the user doesn’t have the right to access.
Using the emerging web protocols for authentication and authorization between applications and social profiles, you can generate static previews of application content and also achieve deeper integration between applications and social streams. I discuss these possibilities in more detail in Chapter 12.
Regardless of whether you want to invest staff time in creating custom integrations, you ought to at least be aware of any integrations available, whether “out of the box” or through partnerships between vendors. If you choose Salesforce.com’s Chatter, for example, you get integration with Salesforce CRM as part of the package. Cloud software vendors are aggressively partnering up and offering proprietary app stores full of integrations with other products.
You may discover that at this point — particularly in the beginning — you don’t need to do anything particularly fancy. Just keep your options open for the long term.
The importance of making exceptions
Technical integration is only part of the story. Another reason for implementing social collaboration in an enterprise setting is organizational integration that helps employees work around gaps in business software and business processes. Loosely structured social collaboration can be a means of keeping the company moving when formal processes break down.
This is a form of exception handling, which is a way of making systems more resilient. Technologists may know that term from programming, where it is a technique for catching software glitches and handling them as gracefully as possible. In social collaboration, exception handling means giving people the tools to work around problems that standard company systems do not address.
Here's an example. Say, your official process is for the employee to fill out a form in the order management system and mark one of three check boxes. However, the worker runs into a situation that doesn't fit choice A, B, or C. Faced with situation D (and whoever designed this system never thought of choice D), the worker marks C as the closest match but can add a social comment about the real status of the order, tagging the person who is next in the workflow with an @mention, which means they will get an alert.
Balancing Requirements: User, Community, and Enterprise Needs
Technology leaders are used to balancing requirements. Security versus ease of access is a classic balance that comes into play when implementing social collaboration. Users want to be able to collaborate anywhere, anytime, from any device, using nothing more complicated than a password. And many users think that the system should recognize them from the last time they accessed it and log them in automatically, without the need for a password. On the opposite end, the security zealot on your staff wants to enforce 16-character passwords with a mix of letters, numbers, and symbols, which users should be forced to change every week. (Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit here, but the tension is there.) So, if your security measures are too Draconian, users won’t use the system, and you may as well not have bothered to implement it. On the other hand, if security is too lax, managers and responsible employees may be uncomfortable discussing important issues on the social platform. Again, why bother if you wind up with a platform that is only good for trivia?
To successfully implement a social collaboration system, you need to consider various requirements and needs throughout the enterprise, some of which I outline here. Then determine what system may work best for your organization. You probably want a web-based application that runs outside the firewall, either in the cloud or your own public-facing server, so users can access it without going through a VPN. I can’t tell you specifically how to balance these demands or predict the specific variations that will arise for your organization, but don’t say I didn’t warn you that they’re coming.
Another complication is that different business units may favor different social collaboration platforms. For instance, the sales team wants Chatter, marketing has been happily piloting something Jive, and the employees of the startup you just acquired say they can’t live without Podio. So how important is it, really, to get them all on one common platform? If you don’t, you obviously lose the potential benefit of having one unified profile for every employee that shows all their social business activity. But does any single platform truly meet everyone’s needs?
On top of that, packaged applications of all sorts are sprouting activity streams, with the vendors often treating them simply as a new user interface element to jazz up software. Activity streams have popped up in software products for business intelligence, recruiting, training, social media monitoring, and other applications. How acceptable is it for them to create their own islands of social activity? Or should you insist on feed and profile integration with your broader social collaboration network?
And here’s another challenge. Perhaps your internal social collaboration gained momentum based on unsanctioned use of a freemium cloud product, meaning one like Yammer that makes a basic version of its cloud software available to use for free. Now that social collaboration is being turned into a program of record, the IT department recommends moving to an on-premises system based on Microsoft SharePoint. Should the technicians be allowed to force the issue? Is their justification compelling? Or will forcing active communities to migrate from one platform to another kill off something promising?
Something like this dilemma cropped up at the SuperValu grocery chain. The free version of Yammer had been adopted by one group within the company, but the cloud software would not have been the first choice of the IT staff. As CIO Wayne Shurts tells it, then-CEO Craig Herkert broke the tie by ruling in favor of keeping Yammer as the collaboration platform that was already proving itself through unofficial use. He wanted a tool to bring together otherwise fragmented operations within the business, which had growth through acquisitions, and he didn’t want to wait for IT to find and implement its idea of the perfect technical solution.
Building Communities to Last
As a technology leader, part of your job is to think a few steps ahead. You don’t want to be responsible for choosing and implementing a system that initially makes your users happy but soon collapses under its own weight. For instance, if you agree that a cloud-based option makes the most sense for your organization, you want to be reasonably confident in the quality of the technology and the stability of the business behind it. Conversely, if you opt for an on-premises collaboration server, will you wind up with buyer’s regret when it falls behind the pace of innovation associated with cloud competitors? Or are there security and compliance concerns far more important than lagging behind on a few incremental features?
These issues are addressed in Part III, in the context of product selection, but the IT leadership team has a special responsibility for evaluating the operational implications of any given choice and questioning the assumptions that other members of the leadership team may make.
Beyond platform choice, the quality of ongoing systems administration and community management make a big difference. For example, if you require that each new discussion or project community get approval before it becomes active, make sure your staff can adequately handle that queue of requests. Or, if part of your organization’s goal with social collaboration is accumulating organizational knowledge, community managers need to help users tag content appropriately for later retrieval.
Social collaboration advocates may boast about reaching beyond the limits of boring, old enterprise systems, but a CIO needs to think about boring, old information management principles like reliability, consistency, and security. Social data may be structured differently, but it’s still corporate data — and that needs to be protected and organized to be useful in the long term.
Planning for Integration
If you’re on the fence, or just decide to wait a bit before starting a social platform, leave open that possibility. You may even start to prepare for that day even though you’re not ready yet. For example, you can start to gather the right metadata in document repositories for an anticipated integration with the social platform you choose.
Some organizations tend to want to address basic integration requirements sooner rather than later. At the top of the list is integration with Microsoft Active Directory or another network directory services tool. Your social platform of choice will almost certainly let you upload a batch of profiles exported from your corporate directory as a starting point, but that doesn’t mean that it will do a good job of ongoing synchronization with the directory.
Another typical top-priority concern is to make the integration tight enough that departing employees have their access to the collaboration network cut off as soon as they’re removed from the corporate directory. On the cheerier side, you want new employees to get their social collaboration accounts turned on the same day as their e-mail accounts.
Identity is also at the core of social collaboration, so making sure that identity data is consistent across all versions of a person’s profile — social, HR systems, e-mail directories — is pretty important. For example, when someone changes a surname, that person shouldn’t have to change it several different places in your online systems. And if your organization is going to operate multiple social collaboration systems — say, Chatter in sales, but NewsGator in other parts of the company — someone with a profile in both should be able to expect that basic elements like phone number and office location will be kept consistent between them.
Because activity streams are currently proliferating across multiple software systems (not just enterprise social networks), I also recommend thinking about a strategy for aggregating those streams where appropriate. Employees should able to see the activities of colleagues they are following regardless of whether their colleague posted a comment on a customer record, a sales dashboard, or to the social collaboration network directly. It’s supposed to be the activity that matters, more than the software.
Embracing Innovation
If your organization positions social collaboration as a driving innovation, you can position yourself as an innovator by embracing it and doing your part to make it successful. Chapter 15 discusses social collaboration as a tool for encouraging innovation from the perspective of the CEO, but it is as much or more of an issue for the CIO.
“Social is the biggest tool in our toolbox around effecting change in our organization,” says Chris Laping, CIO at Red Robin Gourmet Burgers, which has established Yammer accounts for store managers as well as its central administrative staff. In adopting Yammer, “part of the argument I made was ‘I need this tool, my team needs this tool. I need a tool that will let me get out a message and get feedback immediately if assumptions aren’t playing out right and we need to make modifications.’”
In my InformationWeek role, I picked Laping as our Social Business Leader of the Year for 2012 and interviewed him onstage at the E2 conference. I also spoke with store managers who had been around long enough to think of Red Robin as a company that ran on outdated software, and so the implementation of social collaboration came as a pleasant surprise to them.
Old patterns in which IT had all the sophisticated technology and metered employee access to it have been turned on their ear, Laping says. “Now, it’s IT that’s got the stupid stuff, where you’ve got 10 times the connectivity at home, plus access to mobile and YouTube.” In other words, it’s IT that needs to match or at least the approach the sophistication of consumer technologies, he says.
Information technology organizations themselves need to become more collaborative and social, says Frank Wander, the author of Transforming IT Culture (John Wiley & Sons, Inc.). Those qualities lead directly to more successful technology projects and fewer embarrassing failures, he says. While serving as CIO at Guardian Life, Wander advocated for the adoption of social collaboration, although the company’s adoption of Yammer happened after he left to form the IT Excellence Institute. To his mind, the technology is the smallest part of “working social.”
“I think the most important thing is obviously creating a culture where there is trust and collaboration,” he says. “Without that, I don’t think the tools are very important. With that, the tools become very important. They allow us to work together in a quicker and more meaningful way.”