This is posing a growing challenge for organizations that are trying to assemble a mature set of social media capabilities across their business. It hasn’t helped that social business initiatives have — up until recently — consisted of very separate efforts focused primarily on social media marketing and internal collaboration (aka Enterprise 2.0) often with side bets on crowdsourcing and Social CRM. This has often meant the acquisition of very different social media products and services both on-premises as well as SaaS, each with their own social architecture, social identity, search functionality, etc. Now that the social business discussion is moving up to the CIO level in many of the large organizations I’m talking with, this has led to a growing desire to reconcile and make sense of social media platform investment and application portfolios across the enterprise.

To put in plainly, there’s a lot of work to do here, both on the IT side and the social media vendor side. It’s currently too difficult to integrate today’s social media products into a set of coherent and consistent social business capabilities with unified security, identity, discovery, analytics, management and governance. Some of the issues are technical and some of them are organizational but fortunately it turns out that gaining intellectual control of enterprise social media is certainly possible today. Frameworks and approaches of above 1.0 maturity for this now exist, such as Social Business Design (disclaimer: This is the process we use ourselves.)

So businesses have some choices to make today if they want to organize better around social media. The first choice is the set of platforms, technologies, and standards they would like to have. The second is the processes, organizational structures, and cultural/behavioral changes they’d like to see realized. And finally, the third set is the level of resources, prioritization, and funding that will be provided. IT departments will be affected by all of these, but the first and last ones the most, and yet they must also understand that it’s likely that social media is going to become a function in the organization that is somewhat similar to theirs. I currently see a growing parallel between IT departments and social business units, in that they supply capabilities across the business and support new business initiatives so that they’re successful in using technology to create better outcomes. Whether social business units ultimately become part of IT (not likely in most organizations in my opinion), move into HR or corporate communications, or become an independent unit is a trend that is still unclear, but these are the most likely scenarios of who ends up in charge of enterprise social media.

What is clear, however, is that social media is having an immediate and sustained impact on IT decisions at the moment. Sometimes this is a disruptive impact because social media now deeply affects how IT delivers on intranets, portals, collaboration, unified communication, content/document management, workflow, and business intelligence (at the very least.) This means there are some hard choices to make. They are also ones that once made will well situate the organization to much more naturally, gracefully, and effectively incorporate social media in the way it achieves top-line business objectives.

To reduce the undesirable aspect of social media impact and better capture the many upsides, IT departments should think carefully about several key issues related to 1) social media standards, 2) federated platform selection, and 3) on-the-ground consumer-style enablement of business uses of social media. In particular, this will help define a clear vision as social business service delivery is becoming increasingly blurry as organizations acquire a growing portfolio of internal and external social business platforms that also connect to existing IT systems that are in turn getting their own social media features. The list below will help focus on what’s important while enabling the business to meet its needs.

Preparing for Social Business as a Strategic IT Capability

I’ve covered the highest level management issues in getting a large enterprise strategically ready for social business before in Introducing The Social Business Unit and Organizing for Social Business: The Issues, so these are the concerns specific for preparing on the IT side of the house:

1. Vigorously encourage social computing standards, but don’t be held back by their immaturity. Enterprises have not pushed hard for standards in social software like we’ve done in previous generations of IT. Consequently most of the social media standards that exist today are consumer-focused. We cannot forget standards enable choice, interoperability, ensure pools of talent, prevent lock-in, lower costs, and provide many other benefits. Portable social graphs, open activity streams, standardized social applications are the focus here but there are other standardization issues as well. Not every vendor will support the emerging standards for enterprise social media and choices are going to be limited at first. It is essential for IT to defend this position and provide the advantages to the business in regards to social media. Security and mobility should also not be an afterthought in this discussion either.
2. Actively support business-centric social media platform selections. Unfortunately, I see IT departments encouraging the use of legacy platforms that aren’t what are sometimes called “born social”. There’s also more capability to acquire that just a base social network, social CMS, or social intranet platform. There is also social listening, analytics, management, compliance, and governance. Business users won’t necessarily know all the required moving parts for a mature and sophisticated social media capability but IT should and must. I’ll be exploring the social business stack soon to look at this in more detail, but the key is for IT to have a very open mind about building a set of strategic capabilities that makes sense for each of the various functions of the enterprise that will be heavily involved in social media. This is essential for genuine success since what IT either has on the shelf or wants to deliver as a one-size-fits-all to everyone is usually inadequate. Significantly poorer outcomes will also result when dealing with the platform capabilities of each part of the social business spectrum in isolation.
3. Proactively enable independent social media action on the ground with strong IT support. Social media is about empowering people and specifically here we’re talking about empowering workers with social media. They need tools, help, and support for their particular social business activity, whether that is sales, marketing, product development, customer care, or what have you. They will be looking, perhaps just once, at IT for help for service delivery with this. IT must enable and support choice and the widest possible options for both internal and external social business. Not doing so means that business users will be driven to service providers that can meet their requirements and deadlines, which often puts social media outside the range of IT involvement and governance. Preparing ahead of time for the growing lists of requests that I’m already hearing from IT managers means planning ahead and following an emergent enterprise architecture approach. Take this to heart and support centrally, while empowering locally.

For additional details, please read Reconciling the enterprise IT portfolio with social media and stay tuned for a deeper dive into the moving parts of what Peter Kim calls a modern holistic social business capability.

“Why are those IT guys spending three years on an SAP roll out? I want them to focus on projects that has a direct value for my sales and marketing! Who cares about that ugly ERP system that everybody hates?”

Chances are that if you are working for a large company, this will sound very familiar. I have to admit that it is hard to understand why the IT department is focused on a multi-million ERP consolidation project that doesn’t seem to help you at all in winning more deals. Even more, due to this “beast” of a project they don’t have time to help you in your Enterprise 2.0 / Web 2.0 endeavors. Double #FAIL.

Does that mean that IT departments are not with the times anymore? Are CEOs doing the wrong things? Is Enterprise 2.0 the big savior that will guide us through the economic difficult times?

Before jumping to any conclusions, let’s backtrack a bit to the root of the problem. The big disconnect between IT and business that you see in many companies can be explained by what you could call “the gap between IT stability and business agility”. IT has always been seen as a cost for a company, and especially in these economic times, that means that companies are trying to squeeze their IT budgets. The role of CIO or head of IT is one of the more difficult positions to be in: you get less and less budget, but somehow you need to deliver more and faster to the business units. (And let’s not forget that almost everyone in the company is putting you under pressure.)

So, there lies one of the roots of the problem: if you are an experienced IT head, you will be tempted to consolidate your systems and platforms. Kick back the plethora of small niche vendors and products and settle with one or two vendors. Most obvious choices are for instance to have an “SAP and Microsoft”-only (or IBM-only for that matter) policy. That means that in the former case you would have your ERP, CRM, KM, HR, BI, Portal from SAP and Office suite, server OS and database from Microsoft (just an example setup).

As you can see on the diagram, the price you pay for consolidating and reducing your IT platforms is that with a higher (IT) stability, the trade off is a lower (business) agility.

Does that mean that we should stop consolidating and reducing our IT systems and platforms? Not necessarily.. Remember that although you might never really “see” your ERP system, it does control the majority of the core processes of your company. Furthermore, it does not make sense for a company to have three different large ERP systems running, resulting in a situation where one business unit being unable to gain insight into other’s. Also, it’s pretty hard (and very expensive) for a company to hire an army of Oracle, SAP, Microsoft and IBM experts just to keep your systems up and running (in the assumption that you’re lucky enough to get hold of that expertise of course).

What you get is the realization that your IT department is running at a different speed than your business. IT is focused on the platforms and core systems with a long-term vision and planning, while the business wants to be able to adapt, on a day-by-day basis, to changing market conditions.

So, how can we approach this disconnection? Well, as a starter I believe we need to redefine what is expected from the IT department. As I posted earlier on a different blog the IT department should be transformed from a solutions provider to a solutions enabler. It is unrealistic to expect the IT department in a large organization to be as agile as an internet start-up or a cloud services provider.  Corporate IT should focus on the core processes, the large back-end ERP systems, big desktop roll-outs, governance, compliance, etc. Instead of expecting them to deliver you every single piece of skunkworks project, small web application or social collaboration tool; take that power into your own hands. Hire external experts to help you with collaboration processes and tools, rent some services in the cloud for fast go-to-market. The IT department will help you with plugging your new system into the backed system by providing APIs and will help you integrate into the user directory or do security assessments upon your requests.

Does that sound scary? It does. But let’s look at the division of responsibilities:

IT department:

• Focus on systems supporting core processes (ERP, CRM, etc.)
• Consolidating and rationalising the IT landscape
• Focus on security and compliance in the corporate IT landscape
• Open up parts of the back-end systems through APIs

Business:

• Focus on processes and applications that add direct business value
• Hire external expertise or rent cloud services to get the job done (regardless of the vendor policy of the IT department)
• Plug these applications into the company’s back-end systems by the APIs that have been provided by the IT department

So, the irony of being able to better align the goals of your business and IT lies in the fact that you actually have to completely disconnect the two.

Now the inevitable question is: “How are we going to reconnect Business with IT, considering the above mentioned challenges?” My next blog posts will introduce Social Business Design as a strategic framework for analysis and future implementation. It allows the traditional-IT-as-we-know to focus on its core function, whilst providing an evolutionary roadmap for satisfying the emergent needs of business and users whose expectations for IT service provisioning are increasingly informed by the consumer-facing social web.

That said, this is also my inaugural blog post for the Headshift blog. I recently joined the team in London and one of my roles will be to focus on helping our clients to solve this IT-business disconnect/reconnect problem. Previously, I worked for a global IT consulting firm / system’s integrator where I helped out IT departments to integrate their disconnected systems and advised business units on the disruptive change that new emerging technologies can bring. Follow my stream of thoughts on Twitter or drop me a mail for any questions

This post originally appeared on the Headshift blog.