Chapter 21
Ten Obstacles to Social Collaboration Success
I like telling social collaboration success stories, and I tell a lot of them, partly because it’s easier to get people to talk about their successes than their failures. The success stories really are out there, but the failures are, too. Fortunately, social collaboration failures don’t tend to be big, embarrassing, expensive doom-the-company–style failures. Still, a social collaboration system that doesn’t accomplish anything is a waste of time.
Some of the material that follows is adapted from a column I wrote for Information Week’s social business section. I’ve also benefitted from reading (and in some cases, editing) the columns on this topic by Dion Hinchcliffe, executive vice president of strategy at Dachis Group and co-author of Social Business by Design. The obstacles arise “not because social intranets aren’t useful, but coordinating (and sometimes fighting) the IT department, corporate communications, HR, and often competing vendor camps inside the company means that many firms aren’t as far along as they should be,” he says.
The notion of an Enterprise 2.0 revolution in business around social software goes back to at least 2006 and Andrew McAfee’s definition of how Web 2.0 technologies would change business. I admit I tend to take the truth of this as self-evident. Here are ten reasons why it ain’t necessarily so.
Overcoming a Commanding-and-Controlling Culture
Who says every organization wants to be transparent and flexible and invite participation from every quarter? What if the CEO sees corporate social media as giving employees the tools they can use to plot against him? Why foster the illusion of democratic organization if that’s not the way you want to run the company?
I’m painting an extreme picture, but it doesn’t take a Dilbert-style Pointy-Haired Boss. Lots of moderately conservative organizations will think twice — and maybe rightly so — about whether an internal social network makes sense for their corporate culture.
In an organization like this, you might try working with the most forward-thinking divisional leader you can find on a pilot project, which ideally will produce results showing the value of opening up the lines of communication and the possibilities for collaboration.
Ultimately, if senior leaders can’t be persuaded to loosen the corporate necktie one notch, your organization may not be ready for social collaboration.
Fending Off Negative Connotations
The phrase “Facebook inside our company” works magic in some quarters. When SAS Institute implemented Socialcast, that was exactly the phrase the corporate communication folks promoting the project used. They heard Facebook and thought, This collaboration system will spread virally through our company — and isn’t that wonderful?
Facebook has other connotations, however. If management hears Facebook but thinks frivolous, time-wasting medium people will use to share jokes and baby photos, then appealing to a comparison with Facebook or even using the world “social” will only make it more difficult to sell the concept internally.
You might instead try making a comparison to LinkedIn given that social network is all business. Better yet, transition as quickly as possible to showing social collaboration in the context of work. You will probably find yourself falling back on occasional comparisons to how a particular feature like tagging or sharing works on Facebook or Twitter, but make sure you explain how it is used productively for business.
If you think alternate terminology will help, try “networked business” as an alternative to social business, emphasizing the importance of networks between people as well as digital networks. Some consultants talk about “emergent collaboration,” where “emergent” means the collaboration emerges naturally from a network of people who share a common goal rather than being imposed by a top-down structure. Instead of saying that you’re trying to make the organization more social, you can talk about making it more agile and adaptable — which are indeed goals of social collaboration.
You probably will not be able to edit “social” out of your vocabulary all together, but you can try to put the focus on the power of the network to bind an organization together and make it more effective.
Avoiding Fragmentation
The explosion of social software tools is a source of great innovation, but creates a lot of confusion. Organizations can easily wind up with several enterprise social networks used by different teams or departments, or for different purposes, along with social applications for purposes (such as project management or employee recognition), each coming with their own user profiles and activity streams and notions of how connections are formed.
A fragmented social environment — that is, one that promises a global view of people and activity, but in fact doesn’t — might be worse than none at all.
Employees and teams may have legitimate reasons for wanting to use a variety of tools for different purposes, but you should try to help them choose wisely and seek opportunities for integration.
Lacking Resources for Integration
In enterprise IT, integration is the universal goal that is never quite perfectly achieved. For every application, there is a threshold of “good enough” integration to make the system usable. One of the hurdles that successful enterprise social networks must clear is having enough integration with relevant systems (such as corporate directories and content management systems) that they deliver on their promise as next-generation, people-centric portals.
The vendors can deliver all the application programming interfaces imaginable, but achieving the necessary integrations still requires IT time and effort. If an enterprise social network launches with significant integration gaps, employees come away unimpressed. For example, if the social collaboration network’s search function fails to present search results from other content repositories — and that is where most of the important corporate documents actually reside — it will be much less useful than if it boasted an integrated search capability.
Generating Buzz
Nothing succeeds like success. Users will find a collaboration network compelling if their friends and co-workers are active on it, contributing content and answering each other’s questions. More often, early users of the collaboration network find it a ghost town: no citizens and no content.
Community managers refer to a low-traffic community as the empty bar problem. No one wants to hang out where there’s nothing going on. Somehow, you have to get the party started.
And this is one reason why it’s often a bad idea to deploy an enterprise social network company-wide across a large organization, when adoption is unlikely to occur everywhere at the same rate. Instead, start with a smaller group of people — perhaps divided by geography but united around some corporate function or professional interest — and let them prove the value of social collaboration. After you have a good story to tell, it will be easy to get the party started elsewhere in the company.
Competing with Free Public Social Networks
Employees will inevitably compare their experience on an enterprise social network with the experience that they enjoy on consumer sites, such as Facebook. That can be a problem if the enterprise experience suffers by comparison by being awkward to navigate, frustrating to use, or missing important features.
Also, if there is too much bureaucracy and administrative overhead associated with the corporate social environment, some project teams might find it easier to collaborate through a Facebook group or a freemium product (such as Yammer or Teambox).
Is that a bad thing? It certainly can be if sensitive information is being shared through a tool that doesn’t meet corporate security and compliance requirements. For example, a Facebook Group could be a fine solution for organizing a holiday party but not a merger.
In the case of a freemium solution (such as Yammer), the open-minded organization might at least consider the solution of “paving the cow paths” by officially sanctioning something that’s already working and establishing corporate control over it. Now that Yammer is owned by Microsoft and will be offering increased integration with SharePoint, the cloud service is gaining credibility in the enterprise. However, most organizations would prefer to make a deliberate choice of a collaboration network rather than blessing the work of renegades.
Complying with Industry Regulations
Regulated industries (such as financial services and healthcare) must pay particular attention to whether an enterprise social network meets compliance requirements, such as data archiving for financial advisor communications and protection of patient information under the data security and privacy provisions of HIPAA (the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act). Moreover, they might tend to see more risk than benefit in a technology that makes it easy to share information widely when they have a responsibility to keep some categories of information under tight control.
These are not insurmountable obstacles, but they can slow things down. Regulatory strictures may dictate the choice of an on-premises solution over a cloud service, for example. Internal data governance groups may have to review and sign off on implementation plans and may limit the potential applications of a social collaboration network.
Attracting Participants
With few exceptions, such as the case of the French IT services firm Atos banning e-mail in favor of social collaboration, organizations that adopt internal social software promote its use but do not make it mandatory. Dictating a solution might be easier. At least, it might sound easier.
Voluntary adoption is probably the right approach, though. If social software really is so wonderful, employees ought to gravitate to it naturally, as something that makes their lives easier. If the adoption isn’t happening, maybe it’s the social network that needs to change to accommodate employee behavior rather than the other way around.
If you’re having trouble attracting participants, retrace your steps and look for things you can change about how the software is being used and how online communities are forming. Identify advocates who are using social collaboration effectively and ask them to spread the word about its potential. Think through anything you can do to remove procedural or technical roadblocks to participation and community formation.
Suffering Groupware, Knowledge Management Hangover
Haven’t we heard all these promises before? The vision of enterprise social networking sure can sound a lot like the benefits that were supposed to be delivered by previous generations of enterprise collaboration, workflow, and knowledge-management products. Sure, sure, it’s different this time.
For social software to be successful, it has to do a better job of living up to its own hype. As a social collaboration advocate, you need to be serious about setting high standards for the software or cloud services vendor of your choice, while setting equally high standards for your own organization to demonstrate how social collaboration can make a difference.
Falling Back on E-mail
E-mail habits have been established by decades of use in the workplace and will not be easily undone. In principle, any internal message that will go to more than a couple of participants — or even one that would be potentially useful to more than a single recipient — belongs on the social collaboration network, not in e-mail. Yet because e-mail is for many people the tool that is closest to hand, it is the one they are more likely to use. Defaulting to e-mail when the social collaboration network is the more useful tool may be like using a screwdriver to pound in a nail, but it’s the way many people work.
In Chapter 19, I discuss the tactic of replying to an e-mail with a link to a blog post or wiki article, so that even a discussion that starts in an e-mail moves to the social collaboration network. There are also technological solutions you can experiment with, such as software for integrating e-mail and social modes of communication. For example, the Jive for Outlook plug-in allows you to convert an e-mail to a social discussion thread conversation starter posted to a Jive collaboration network.
There is no one magic solution, other than highlighting specific business collaboration scenarios — such as cooperative editing of a document with many authors or gathering of information from many sources — where the social collaboration network is clearly superior. If employees accumulate enough positive experiences with social collaboration, they may start to form new habits rather than being in thrall to e-mail forever.