Saw this funny cartoon in an otherwise serious (&excellent) article:
After nearly falling off my chair laughing, I felt like
adding another box:
Social Media: "Social Enterprise emancipates individuals to be collaborative free agents building collective intelligence in the cloud" - 3 books and 10 keynotes later, they still haven’t caught on :-)
Don’t get me wrong. I am a big believer in Social Enterprise
or Enterprise 2.0 (or the puzzling phrase 'Facebook for the Enterprise'), a concept heavily promoted by the likes of IBM,
Salesforce.com, InformationWeek, Yammer etc. However, as a practitioner, I always felt there are
some fundamental behavioral and structural differences between the ‘consumer social’ and the ‘work
social’ worlds, even without getting into the universally understood challenges
such as security, data privacy, tool features etc.
My perspective is as a passionate user of work collaboration technologies (before the social buzzword) and also as someone who has evangelized and tried to
drive the adoption in every group and company (small to large) I worked for over the last 13 years. The results have
been mostly mixed and let me share some patterns of challenges:
Lack of mutual
self-interest: Real collaboration is through strong individual motivation
and mutual self-interest, not by a corporate edict (‘thou shalt
collaborate’). In your company, if people do not regularly make new connections without a pressing need, even over lunch, interaction without a concrete short-term
reason is unlikely or not sustainable. Aligned self-interest is hard to establish
without personal relationship and trust. Hence, social interaction might work
for deep existing relationships, but not for new casual ones (or 'weak ties'), lowering the allure of
‘click and collaborate’.
Maslow's hierarchy of
needs: Most people work to pay bills and the goal is to get the job done as
quickly as possible. Work is at the lower levels of the Maslow's pyramid (safety/
employment), whereas in online social networks, people just want to ‘waste
time’ building a connection and empathizing, in the esteem/ self-actualization
levels. You may have a few good friends at work, but it’s not the same as
wading through tons of status feed from relative strangers at work at 10pm.
Network effects:
might be the biggest barrier to adoption. Metcalfe’s Law sounds great, but also
means that the value kicks in only at critical mass. Otherwise, you go there
once or twice, but have no reason to revisit and slowly forget or give up.
There’s an interesting paradox – the smaller and specific the network is, the
more valuable it is for the employee (self-interest and relevance at critical mass), but the
greater and general purpose the network is,
the more valuable it is for the company (IT investments, streamlining, ROI etc), making it challenging to
merge the two motivations. There’s also a ‘chicken and egg’ problem in network,
as it is hard to migrate everyone to a new tool, but also less valuable if
everyone is not on the same tool. Facebook famously and brilliantly solved the
network problem by going after college after college, giving exclusivity and
relevance per each network, but it continues to be hard for enterprises, especially due to the challenge of reaching critical mass in multiple sub-networks.
Different online
habits: People vary widely in their communication preferences (e.g., email vs.
in-person) by personality, nationality, culture, age etc. Most executives &
business people prefer verbal communication, even if they claim to be 'social'. Many employees do not feel
comfortable in openly debating complex issues electronically, for the
(legitimate) fear of misinterpretation. You cannot stay anonymous in an internal
network, raising the stakes. You have to be naïve or rationally risk-seeking
(e.g., people in satellite offices) to engage in company-wide (or even
org-wide) open discussion on sensitive topics.
No ‘Ashton Kutcher’
prize: Every company already has one – its CEO. The charisma of people in
an enterprise is mostly determined by the organizational structure rather than follower
count or social activity. There’s a clear pecking order as to whose opinion is
more important, even more in a hierarchical organization (like the Orwell quote: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others!”) Investing in internal social tools for increasing influence is hardly worth the effort, unlike
the ‘people social’ world, where the Google VP in Egypt or grass-root Twitter activists could become instant celebrities. Clearly, flatter and democratic organizations will
be the future norm, but it’ll take some time.
Does it mean Social Enterprise is a fad? Absolutely not. There are clearly select classes of enterprise business problems,
cut out for social tools, I feel. Hope to discuss that in a later post.
Why do you think consumer social-like behavior does not easily translate to enterprise?
Why do you think consumer social-like behavior does not easily translate to enterprise?
P.S Is this ‘Facebook
in the enterprise’?
