At this point, organizations are realizing they have to put some serious thought into making organization-wide sense of social media service delivery. Enterprise social media used to be quite a bit simpler. Either it consisted of a few blogs and wikis being used in the far corners of the organization or it was a bit of external social media for marketing and customer support purposes. Now social media is making significantly deeper inroads in various ways across today's enterprise IT portfolios.
Social media is now a growing component of enterprise communication and collaboration, with the latest Frost and Sullivan data from this year showing that out of 200 C-level execs, sixty-nine percent were closely tracking "social media, placing it ahead of telepresence, VoIP, shared team spaces, soft phones, and even unified communications and unified messaging." Half of the respondents say social media is already used within their organization, and 41 percent are using the technology personally.
This is driving areas of the organization responsible for unified communication, document management, the intranet, and even workflow and business intelligence to address the influx of social media into their respective business functions as vendors add the capabilities and end users increasingly expect or even demand them.
In the companies I've talked with this year, this rapidly changing dynamic has complicated strategic IT planning while also making platform and tool selection the primary focus of attention instead of perhaps more important social media adoption issues. While the large enterprise social business vendors such as IBM, Cisco, Jive, and Microsoft all have increasingly mature offerings, sorting out how social media will have presence in the business has become significantly more complex due to rapidly increasing choice, proliferation of social media channels, and poor integration and standards. Companies are working hard this year to get their arms around the accumulating IT issues while at the same time grappling with how social media is transforming the way their organizations engage with their customers, business partners, and workers.
Contributing to the overall challenge is almost too much social media choice: Many top enterprise software vendors from Saba and Salesforce to SAP and Oracle are incorporating social media ever deeper into the way their products work. Fortunately, the use of social media features in existing software packages are often optional at this point. It's clearly up to organizations, however, to determine the manner in which their internal and external service delivery incorporating social media is going to function in a way that's easy to understand by internal business stakeholders.
Along with this, business and IT leaders are struggling to figure out specifically where social media functions belong, both in terms of 1) delivery platform as well as 2) organizational capability.
For the former, businesses are asking a lot of hard questions these days. Is enterprise social media an intranet function? Or is it part of an social network that runs side-by-side with e-mail and the internal portal? Perhaps it's most at home as part of content and document management? Or maybe it's a single consistent capability that faces both externally and internally as we're seeing with Jive and a few other platforms. The answers to these questions largely seem to be yes, but without an obvious road to connect all of them together into something cohesive.
Part of the issue, as Information Week's Michael Finneran recently pointed out, is that "most companies haven't made nearly enough headway on basic integration. A collaboration architect for a major global manufacturer says a lack of standards is still a major roadblock." That existing business applications and IT tools are also sprouting social media features is turning into as big a headache as the poor integration between platforms.
For the latter, organizations are today are working to determine the best internal home for social media management and oversight. While some are looking at corporate communications and HR, it is IT and the line of business that are often in charge of social media projects in the short-term. Longer term, I've written about a move to develop social business units that we're seeing in organizations higher on the maturity curve, as well as the more common "triumvirate approach" when organizing for social business that usually involves a committee of key stakeholders in HR, brand, corporate communications, and IT.
Related: Ten emerging Enterprise 2.0 technologies to watch.
At this point, organizations are realizing they have to put some serious thought into making organization-wide sense of social media service delivery. Like business were forced to do five to ten years ago with traditional IT, the days of putting off social media strategy and portfolio rationalization has now passed. While I've painted a complex picture of the issues and concerns here, the good news is that some businesses are now finding their way and I've attempt to synthesize the issues and some potential solutions into a list below.
What then are the top issues organizations are grappling with today in terms of reconciling social media with their existing IT portfolios? These seem to be the most common ones:
Of course, organizations will have other specific issues unique to themselves as they attempt to modernize and update their IT portfolio strategy for social media, but the list above is a good start on the top-level concerns. Although they are somewhat focused on internal social media, the issues are largely the same for external social media but some additions.
I would also like to hear more from those that are tackling social media at a strategic level and share what the issues that you're coming across. Social business and closely related topics are one of the top areas this year to address on the agendas of many CHROs, CCOs, CIOs, and line of business executives. Sharing what we're learning as an industry about what works and what doesn't will greatly help organizations navigate one of the most significant changes to IT in a generation.