Collaboration and Enterprise Social Networking
Guest Author: Jose Antonio Morales
After a few interesting meetings I’ve come to realize that the concept of collaboration and Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) can be confusing.
In my opinion, social networking tools should enable the negotiation of common interests between individuals. It is a system based on allowing each user to win by relating with others. The system works well because each user understands that tolerance is part of the reciprocal agreement; in Facebook I can see information submitted by my friends that may or may not be interesting to me.
ESN should work in the same way. That means that the the right question could be: What’s the common interest?
When I think about collaboration I imagine a set of tools that help me and my coworkers to share information in multiple ways. Tools that will enable each individual user to reach information. I see collaboration focused on information and ESN focused on results.
Obviously collaboration and ESN complement each other.
Collaboration alone can cause adoption problems. Sharing information can be ineffective if only a few care about.
When collaboration finds a purpose that answers a common interest then I believe it becomes ESN. Enterprise Social Networking is not imitating FaceBook’s functionality it is implementing a new way of working, focused on results and using collaboration tools.
ESN is based on social interactions with a purpose. A technological solution should only be part of the system.
Guest Author: Jose Antonio Morales
Born peruvian, currently in Slovenia and heading to NY. Father of 2 and husband of 1.
The relationship between technology and human development fascinates me. I’m a born entrepreneur and started early with IT. My first encounter was with an Atari 800XL and my latest gadget is an iPad. Organized and participated in many events, the latest being the SharePoint Conference in Peru.
It’s going to be interesting to see the content and case studies coming out of the adoption of SharePoint 2010 as more and more companies start using the ESN tools. What would be interesting (to me, anyway) would be to see a survey of who is using the new features, and why certain features are not used, and why.
We could start building the survey and use this forum for gathering answers.
Shall we?
Jose Antonio, thank you for this post. I am always interested to learn more about how people are collaborating in business platform environments like SharePoint. One thing you mentioned above really caught my attention: “when collaboration finds a purpose that answers a common interest”.
Over the past 18 months, I have been an avid user of Twitter as a collaboration tool. Some days, I find an invaluable nugget, and other days I wonder if the tool has a purpose. On those days, I think of Twitter as “collaboration without a purpose”, and am reminded of a recent article remarking that >90% tweets are ignored.
Now, I’ll take a different perspective. Imagine SharePoint as a platform for content-centric business application. Here is an environment ripe for “collaboration with a purpose”. People want to share content, information, status, direction, and news. The content in SharePoint may only communicate part of the story, but when coupled with social technologies, valuable context may be added to the content. Or consider instances where content is coupled with workflow, where business is in motion around SharePoint content — social technologies can provide real-time context, alerts, status, or directions that make the business operate more efficiently.
I will offer an example: what if I have 10 pieces of content or work items available for me to review on a SharePoint site. It would be awesome to have a kind of social dashboard or social web part that showed me a priority (e.g., my boss says work on item #3 first), a status (e.g., Bob says he is now working on item #5 and expects to be finished by 4pm today), or alert (e.g., customer service reps had a call from Client A, and processing item #2 is now a high priority). The ability to receive, view, and offer instant updates can make work much more efficient.
This is where I see collaboration meeting Enterprise Social Networking — in the business application arena — and I am all for more of it being made available to end-users.
Hi Derek, I share your enthusiasm and most of your ideas. Just to explain myself with more details I would like to add the following info:
I think of tweeter as a tool that adds to the collaboration system. When I see it as an independent solution I find difficult to understand it’s purpose.
I believe the purpose is not a technological issue, it is a processes issue. Therefore no functionality would make the work if the process is not defined considering the social factor that plays within the organization.
What if you implement a wonderful dashboard with accurate info, and no body else uses it? It is not only a training problem, ,it is more a lack of understanding of what is good for each one of the team members. Might be that a dashboard will make one guy to work more and for instance productivity can be affected negatively.
As a subset of the content standards I gave a shot at coming up with some social ones http://www.rharbridge.com/?page_id=298. I see this as very important.
Enterprise Social Networking is a good thing, but I still feel like Governance and effective measurement/integration into business processes has a long way to go when it comes to Social. I loved an analogy I think Ben Curry once used: It’s like putting the toothpaste back in the tube – Once you let it loose you had best be ready to adequately support it.
Thoughts?
Thanks Richard for sharing your comment and that link and great analogy!
I agree with you that it is a matter of processes and integration. Based on my experience the challenge is that most processes are ineffective and changing them or improving them is always a big issue.
My point would be that the social networking is giving us a clue of how to fix that problem, that is to include a balanced social (within the organization) negotiation. To make it real it is needed a clear goal and the right questions.
SP can truly help because of it’s integration with other business systems.
Would be fantastic to identify a good source of governance best practices! Do you know some?