systematicHR

Best Practice #2: Show direct business value by aligning social computing to real-world work. ((Systematic Viewpoints, September 11, 2007. “Social media in the enterprise – best practice #2.”))

The other systematic (TOS) continues by saying:

If you’re thinking of deploying a form of social media, it must have a defined value proposition, be aligned to a business process and demonstrably improve or enhance that process: eliminating friction, reducing errors, capturing undocumented data or knowledge and making it easily findable…you get the point.

If you crave a Sharepoint or other collaboration instance, find a project that is broadly distributed. Chances are high that too much of the process and communications is happening between a small number of participants via email and attachments. The rest of the team wonders what’s happening and the lack of visibility leads to a lack of engagement.

Once again, this is all part of the overall governance process. When implementing any type of social media, or any technology for that matter, you should obviously have a pretty darn good idea of why you are implementing it, and how it will bolster the overall business strategy. This should be fairly straightforward if you’re seeking better collaboration models for example, but rather than just implementing and providing some governance around the process, perhaps you should take TOS’s guide and find a project that is broadly distributed and create a case study out of it. This internal case study will server several purposes: first, it allows for better adoption. People will see that the technology is working and if performed in a high profile process, it will get people on board. Second, it gives others a roadmap of how to use the technology in the most effective way. In essence, your case study is a set of best practices targeted to your organization’s process and cultural standards. Third, it acts as a method of communicating the technology is ready and available, in effect helping you with your change management strategy as you attempt to have employees adopt the technology and change their core behaviors around collaboration.