March 2010
Friends,
Happy Passover or Easter, and a pleasant springtime to
you!
This month’s theme for the newsletter is use of Social Networks in the
workplace. Of course Social Networks are very much a done deal outside of work; whether or not the
claim that Facebook is overtaking Google as the #1 online destination is true, no one is even
thinking of scoffing at it, or at Twitter, as a presence in today’s reality. But in the workplace?
Opinions vary. My own is that applying social tools inside a company can have big benefit – if it is
done correctly (the usual caveat). Read on.
Cheers,
This issue’s theme: Social Networks in the workplace
Social Network technology
started outside of work: Facebook, Orkut, Flickr, Twitter, and many other communities have
changed the way people – mostly very young ones at first, but that is history – interact and have
fun. For work there was LinkedIn, which is fast adopting the methods of Facebook, but it isn’t
really inside the workplace. The adoption of full fledged social networks inside the
enterprise – now there is a decision that companies are agonizing over: should we do it? Will it
raise productivity – or be a huge time sink?
Those of you who know me can guess what I think
about this: go for it! These tools open such exciting ways for employees to cooperate, share
knowledge, synergize and create value – and, yes, enjoy themselves while doing it... it’s a
no-brainer to me that a company should value this.
Of course, it’s difficult to adopt a
technology if you don’t know much about it; there are still many organizations where social
networking is a distant dream, where management views it with suspicion. To those I may be of some
assistance – I do offer a lecture that explains the essence, the excitement and the potential of
social networks. You can read about it here.
What YOU can do about it
Actionable Tip
One way to draw people into the exuberant collaboration that Web 2.0
has introduced is by setting up a Wiki, a web site edited jointly by an entire group of people. The
most familiar Wiki is of course the hugely successful Wikipedia; and while most of its users are
passive readers, every one of them – you, me, us – can go in and edit or add any article in a matter
of minutes (give it at try!)
What few realize is that setting up a Wiki like that is
free, easy, and fast. Any computer-savvy techie in your organization should be able to install the
free MediaWiki system – the exact one used by Wikipedia – without any problems. Once it’s
up on a server on your network, your group could start creating and editing pages that facilitate
knowledge sharing and collaboration on projects. At Intel we had an internal Wikipedia clone –
“Intelpedia” – that was a grassroots project that grew rapidly and found many excellent
applications. It’s a great way to get your feet wet in Social Media space.
Food for Thought
As with most novel technologies, there will be those companies who
try to resist the new wave of social computing. And as with most novel technologies, resistance will
ultimately be futile. I remember well how the corporate world tried to resist the World Wide Web in
the mid-nineties (it was supposed to have no business use, and tempt employees to waste their time).
At the time I led Intel’s early adoption of the web, because I saw past the fears to the huge
potential of this new technology; and it was then that I first realized the universal truth that a
company’s management can’t stop new online technology: it can only attempt to oppose it and be
dragged forward, kicking and screaming, by its own employees – or it can encourage an early adoption
and earn a right to influence the technology’s use mode to some degree. Social media are so easily
implemented and so pervasive that employees will use them no matter what; but they could use some
guidance, norms and policies, and will accept these if they make sense (hint: involve the employees
in the definition process to ensure they do!)
Analysis and Opinion
Many “serious” people consider social media to be frivolous (”who cares what Joe had for
breakfast?”) and therefore assume they are of limited value in the enterprise. They couldn’t be more
wrong.
The immediate possibilities for collaboration and serious work via intra-company
networks are clear, and I won’t dwell on them here. Instead I want to point out an aspect that is
often missed: social networks are the latest in a series of technologies that empower and motivate
employees to communicate and create trust across barriers of geography and hierarchy. This trend
started in the nineties, when it became possible for people to set up personal web pages on the
Intranet, thereby allowing others in the company to see them as people with faces, opinions, and
interesting knowledge and work product. Over the years this capability got subsumed in various rich
employee directory tools, such as IBM’s Blue Pages. Today’s advanced social media capabilities go
much further, allowing two-way and group interactions via a variety of blogs, team spaces, wikis and
more; but the underlying principle remains: people become visible to their coworkers, which may be
situated on the other side of the planet, in a rich and humane way, leading to the creation of trust
among them. This trust has always been the key to effective collaboration, and apart from sharing a
beer or a coffee face to face (an excellent but expensive solution) nothing creates trust better
than exchanging photos, viewpoints, and other snapshots of one’s daily existence. And – don’t tell!
– it’s fun too!
Solutions and Resources
A wonderful example of the potential of Enterprise Social
Networking is IBM’s Lotus Connections product. This is a complete solution that links all employees in
an organization via every imaginable Web 2.0 capability: rich profiles, expertise sharing, networks,
blogs, communal bookmarks, and more. Used by IBM itself, it allows any employee to find instantly
who in this huge corporation is the best expert on a problem area they face, see what this expert
published, identify their interest groups and related stakeholders, and start a conversation with
them.
Deploying such a system is no small decision, but it’s certainly worth checking, if
only to get a feel for what is possible if you embrace these technologies to the limit.
|
|
