As my colleague Kate Rush Sheehy pointed out recently, forming a company’s social business strategy and resources requires speed and scale — and for some organizations these two qualities don’t come naturally. Many employees fear the departmental silos they don’t understand. The complex processes that don’t always work. And the colleagues they don’t know — constantly concerned these people will object to their ideas, plans, or points of view. This sometimes irrational worry can frustrate employees, but inactivity typically persists within their organizations anyway. Some companies refuse to let these concerns constrain them, and are trying to do things a little differently.
FINRA, FDA, HIPAA, SARBOX and ITAR, are regarded as curse words in social media and workforce collaboration circles. People don’t want to say them. They don’t want to hear them and they really really don’t want the regulators to swing by for a “chat.” The outcomes created by this mentality are predictable: hesitancy when approaching new technology, over-engineered solutions that inhibit adoption and the pursuit of risky grassroots experimentation.
Are we spamming each other in the enterprise? By using appropriate communication modes we can increase the relevance of what is received through the email inbox while at the same time signal our work to those who are interested.
In my last post I wrote about communication being an important aspect of knowledge work and decision making. I can sometimes get a little too academic with how things are supposed to work and so I thought I’d write a follow-up post that uses a concrete example (IRL for some) of how communication helped me and my colleague, Tom Cummings, just the other night.
The setup here isn’t that important other than to to say we were at the beginning stages of a new project and decided a brainstorming session was in order. We found an empty conference room, a whiteboard and started to get our ideas down.
A knowledge worker spends a good portion of the day communicating – meetings, status reports, emails, phone calls, water cooler talks. Much of this activity is considered unproductive overhead; when you look at a calendar full of meetings you wonder when you’re going to get any REAL work done. And while many popular forms of communication may be inefficient and ineffective, communication is work; perhaps the most important work knowledge workers do.
I’ve had time to sit back and digest the great many discussions, meetings, and ideas circulating at this year’s excellent Enterprise 2.0 Conference in Boston, just over a week ago. For just about everyone I spoke with, there was a consensus that this was a special event this year and the industry has hit a new level of maturity. This was evident by the proliferation of vendors, major client-side success stories such as CSC’s presentation on how they achieved over 50,000 registered internal users of their social community, and the 2.0 Adoption Council’s outstanding all-day workshop of customer stories with concrete lessons learned about planning, advocacy, adoption, community management, ROI, and much more.
Business processes and transactions have always existed in a social context but that aspect has not always led to value creation outside of defined boundaries. Enterprise 2.0 platforms are evolving into becoming platforms for your enterprise applications. User ingenuity has already kicked off the process. Further benefits await those who develop a structured approach.
For those who have been working in the social computing sphere the last few years, either externally or internally, it’s become abundantly clear to us that all business is becoming Social Business.
For the rest of us who aren’t there yet, major change is still evident: The Web itself has become pervasively social as we’ve changed [...]
How do you refer to “this space”? If you’re from a marketing or communications background, you likely refer to “Social Media Marketing.” If you’re from an IT background, you likely refer to “Enterprise 2.0.” There’s nothing wrong with these terms, but it’s time for us to straighten out terminology, especially when it comes to Social Business Design.
