Enterprise Social Networking Objections and Objectives in 2012

Over at InformationWeek’s terrific Brain Yard site, David Carr has an interesting piece looking at “10 Enterprise Social Networking Obstacles.” The article builds off 2012 predictions made by business strategist Dion Hinchcliffe, specifically that social would still be facing an uphill struggle in the enterprise this year. David does a nice job of keying in on objections and issues that we at NewsGator, as a pioneer in truly enterprise-scale social computing, have a wealth of experience in overcoming.

While individually interesting, the objections David lists tend to break down into a couple of categories: cultural and technical.

On the cultural side, objections break down to management perception issues and concerns centered on user adoption. Businesses tend to be top-down hierarchies seeking to drive productivity and improve overall business performance. Given this, there would seem to be little inclination at the management level to introduce technology that would reconfigure established reins of control or, worse, introduce a potential time sink that took workers off task.

But look closer at that management imperative. The real goal is not control, but productivity improvements that drive the bottom line. Smart businesses understand this and have learned from past technology adoption cycles – think of the early days of e-mail or instant messaging in the enterprise – that an earlier embrace is ultimately better for the bottom line. We’re seeing companies focused more on a “how do we do this right?” approach to social, rather than dawdling on “do we need to do this?”

The management-level question, “how do we do this right?” draws out a number of worker level issues and objections that made David’s Brain Yard list and we spend a fair amount of our sales and implementation cycles walking prospects and customers through them: How do keep a handle on how this thing runs? How do we organize and manage communities and their creation? How do we ensure this doesn’t become a gold-plated cyber ghetto all but ignored and abandoned? Conversely, how do we ensure that this doesn’t become a distracting time sink? Given the number, variety and size of our customer implementations – from small government agencies to large, multinational Fortune 50 firms – we have a wealth of experience to draw on, but it’s important to emphasize that the people asking these questions are typically looking for answers in order to advance, not derail, their social efforts.

On the technical side, again, the objections have a familiar ring. Business and government have been burned in the past by a rush to The Next Big Thing that leads first to an expensive integration nightmare and then to a fragile spider web of often duplicative and ill-fitting, maintenance-heavy “solutions.” Further, in today’s world of Internet-enabled business, the questions on data controls, governance and compliance go directly from legal to IT.

David’s fifth point – SharePoint – hits right where we live and thrive. He notes that Dion singled out SharePoint as a factor that has “often slowed down the move to more social tools for big companies in particular”. At NewsGator, we’ve been seeing more and more of the opposite effect and here’s why: SharePoint is a terrific platform for social. With the addition of NewsGator Social Sites, SharePoint becomes a seamless, leading edge social tool that checks off the list of objections cited in David’s piece, both cultural and technical.

SharePoint was built from the start as an enterprise system. Social Sites was designed from the ground up to run as a native managed service application on top of the SharePoint and Microsoft stack; no busloads of integration experts needed. This tight integration imbues Social Sites with SharePoint’s true enterprise scale feature sets that address other key technical objections to social such as control of data access, identity, scalability and connection with other enterprise systems. Other “more social” tools that started life as stand-alone, quasi-consumer point offerings focused in a single area, say, group chat, present a more complex path to these capabilities. Complexity is expensive.

In turn, Social Sites lets organizations easily turn their existing SharePoint investment into a highly manageable and productive social business solution with a feature set rivaling any other on the market. Because it seamlessly integrates with the day-to-day Microsoft tools that people already use to get their work done, Social Sites on SharePoint presents a lower barrier to entry for adoption right out of the gate. Its leading-edge, constantly expanding social feature set – from microblogging and activity streams to expert discovery, badging, and video sharing – help ensure that end users find their social enterprise experience as engaging as their Facebook time.

The past is often prologue. In social business, as was the case in the adoption of so many other enterprise technologies, organizations are looking to reduce complexity, increase value from existing investments and drive productivity to increase profits. We see these fundamentals pushing past lingering resistance to the move to the increased adoption of social business technology and putting solutions like Social Sites in an even stronger position in the coming year.