Social Media in the Enterprise - Part II - Partnering with IT

Earlier this week, I'd provided some context around our journey in enterprise social media. To delve a little deeper, I wanted to offer perspective around the engagement with IT...

I've spent time in IT... I sympathize with these folks. Competing priorities, resource & expertise struggles, off-shoring challenges and increasingly complex environments to support - Unenviable and often thankless tasks. Given these challenges and an ever increasing backlog of work, what could take days or weeks often takes months or quarters.

There were two key components that helped us fast track our social media deployment. The first, as  previously mentioned, was executive support. There's no shortage of demand for IT. Even the most  justifiable and beneficial of projects can get sidelined in a never ending queue of problems and prioritization. Executive sponsorship can clearly help expedite traditional processes. If you don't have one yet, go find your social media evangelist - it's key.

As importantly, Web 2.0 offerings having been cropping up *everywhere*. Wiki's, blogs, podcasts, etc - Each on different platforms, varying levels of complexity, etc;. Heck, I did it myself with a simple DNN community over a weekend. Combine today's tech savvy worker with simple and robust open source software and you have a recipe for potential disaster. Or even worse when employees flock to the plethora of hosted solutions and leverage them inappropriately for company sensitive information. Not to mention the inefficiencies inherent with such disparate solutions - no common indexing, tagging, logins,  etc;. While I'm all for organic growth, at some point, these things have to go mainstream for sustainability, longevity and scalability.

I sometimes tend to over simplify, but the decision seems pretty straight-forward. To me, there are two choices for IT folks:

1) Deny the existence and demand for Web 2.0 offerings and let them propagate like wild-fire. The longer organic growth goes on, the more difficult it will be to provide a centralized solution. As end-users cling to a myriad of disparate offerings, the notion of solving their collective requirements in the long run grows increasingly difficult. You'll also be faced with redundant resource drain as every instance requires *someone* to run / support it. Instead of a core IT team managing a Wiki implementation, we have 100 people, spread across the business doing the same (each, btw, who would be better serving the company if they were focused on their actual role). You'll also lose any hope of control over security, policy enforcement, regulatory compliance, etc;.

2) Accept and embrace Web 2.0 as a critical business tool. Move sooner rather than later to understand the basic business requirements and find a platform that hits the 80% mark and can scale to the size of your organization. Enable the technology, let your user base adopt and help evolve the offering. Let the community do the talking. The collective knowledge of those who migrate to a solution should be used as the primary voice to help shape the direction.

When we started our internal project back in September, we had a little of scenario one going on. There were certainly blog engines, wikis, etc; here and there... It wasn't out of control (yet), but they were there. More importantly when we approached our IT friends, they had a backlog of people with 'similar asks'. Demand was mounting, but there was no organized effort to solve it at the enterprise level.

I'd speculate that by partnering with IT to build and quickly deploy a supported Social Media platform, we made the right decision at exactly the right time... Given our adoption rate on our new 'official' platform, we would easily have another 10 or so rogue efforts in play by now.

 

Comments

[Jeremiah Owyang]

The time is right for IT to get ahead of the ball and work side by side with business.

[Josh Maher]

Yes, getting a corporate sponsored system in place early is a huge step in the right direction. I've heard lots of people say a corporate system is a bad idea....Yet it's the only way to truly get cross-company collaboration and longevity/reliability of the platform. Building social media platform silos only increases the amount of confusion.