Guest comment: Don’t bet your social enterprise (2.0) on Sharepoint

The stratospheric rise of the social web reaches far beyond the likes of Twitter & Facebook. Within many global 2000 companies, the journey to create Social Enterprises (also referred to as Enterprise 2.0) is underway, set against a backdrop of hopelessly outdated methods for employee collaboration & communications.

There’s a lot at stake. Companies that make a smooth transition to a social enterprise can unlock innovation more quickly, capture & share knowledge more effectively and harness their global networks of talent to outwit the competition. But the transition is complicated, requiring not just adoption of new technologies but significant changes in culture and working behavior.

So how do you set about achieving a smooth transition, preferably before your competition? This is where Microsoft’s Sharepoint looms large, as the intranet collaboration platform of choice across many large enterprises today. Now, before I explain some of the dangers of resting your social enterprise strategy on Sharepoint, let me be clear that this is not an attempt at Microsoft bashing. Sharepoint represents a perfectly acceptable enterprise solution chosen by lots of smart CIO’s.

However, over the past 8 years I’ve worked with many large enterprises to plan, build and manage online communities. That experience leads me to believe that companies betting their social enterprise on Sharepoint won’t grab the ‘competitive premium’ and may well struggle to make the intended transition.

Here are 4 reasons why:

Time is money

A candid conversation with most global 2000 CEO’s would reveal that whilst his/her company may have a global brand, large parts of the organization falls well short of operating as a single, efficient global organization. The companies that are first to truly operate as seamless global entities, with traditional silos overcome to empower geographically dispersed colleagues to connect, share, collaborate & learning quickly & effectively, will increase their profitability significantly and create a major competitive advantage.

So if time is money, why hold back the organization by waiting for the lumbering giant Microsoft to introduce the newest releases of Sharepoint, and then go through the expense and complexity of implementation. This is slowing the organization down and ceding the big opportunities to more agile competitors.

Unleash early adopters to accelerate change

There’s one key reason that I prefer the term ‘Social Enterprise’ to ‘Enterprise 2.0’. It reminds us that we’re talking about people, helping them to be more productive, become more skilled & deliver their full range of knowledge and experience for the company’s benefit.

Social media may be new, but understanding human behavior is not. We know for sure that changes doesn’t happen uniformly within an organization.

And yet a dependence on Sharepoint suggests that everyone within an organization gets access to and adopts new capabilities at the same time.

The truth within most organizations, there are a proportion of colleagues (almost certainly a minority) biting at the bit to embrace a more ‘social’ way of working. Empower those early adopters to build their employee communities & demonstrate the value and benefits of the social enterprise. Sure it means losing some control, but welcome to the digital age. When early adopters demonstrate value, the ‘unconvinced majority’ will follow.

Once real momentum and adoption is established, the focus can turn to providing enterprise wide support through something like Sharepoint.

Near game more important than end game

This is surely an alien concept to big business. But the truth is that many of the biggest successes in social media, like Facebook or Twitter, came from focusing on the near game, not the end game. In fact, it is highly unlikely that had Facebook set out its stall to attract 400 million users originally, it would have failed. Instead, it was very focused, nurtured success and created momentum over time. This is a completely different mindset to traditional corporate projects, but an important lesson on the road to success with your social enterprise.

Enterprise mindset too inflexible

The IT community has spent the last 15+ years bringing uniformity to IT investments, in order to eradicate duplicate costs & avoid a mish-mash of inoperable systems. This is the ethos that dictates everyone will use Sharepoint.

But the world of technology evolves fast, and today some of these long standing best practices appear out of kilter with what business leaders need for success. Firstly, the pace of technology innovation has accelerated, making long term IT bets more risky. Simultaneously, the cost of best-in-class technology has fallen dramatically, is available as a service (reducing capital investment) and is much more scalable (e.g.

through the Cloud). And more open platforms and API’s mean much more flexibility, heralding the age of the mash-up (i.e. take multiple best in class solutions and binding them together to maximize value).

Large enterprises need enterprise level collaboration capabilities like Sharepoint. However, this should be combined with more innovative offerings (which integrate with Sharepoint or similar) that allow communities to emerge quickly and flourish. Whilst this approach may bring howls of protest about ‘duplicating investment’ and ‘IT wastage’, in truth there are a choice of outstanding social solutions available in the market place without Microsoft style price tags and implementation complexity.

Furthermore, the financial rewards of the Social Enterprise dwarf the associated technology costs. You just have to jettison the traditional approach and mindset in favour of something more innovate and entrepreneurial if you want to be a winner!

About the Author - Graeme Foux, Knexus CEO

A successful internet entrepreneur and innovator, Graeme has worked in the tech industry for the past 18 years.

In the early 1990s, Graeme worked at two Silicon Valley internet/multimedia start-ups, where he created successful commercial agreements with Apple and Compaq, built a retail software network of 3k stores and formed technology partnerships with EMC & AOL amongst others. In 1996, he returned to Europe and launched a pioneering internet consultancy, Momentus, which created web 1.0 strategies for firms including Goldman Sachs, Nomura, Morgan Stanley and McGraw Hill. Graeme led the successful trade sale of the company in 2000.

Graeme subsequently became a senior partner at Chicago based consultancy firm Diamond Management & Technology Partners (with 1,100 consultants), leading the global Financial Services practice. In 2002, he founded Knexus, a pioneering social software solutions company headquartered in New York and London. The company provides integrated social media and rapid learning solutions used by global companies like Cadbury, Dell, Ingram Micro, Nokia and Shell to build trusted relationships, create profitable conversations and drive monetization through enhanced engagement.

Graeme is a recognized thought leader in 'social business' through his speaking engagements at conferences such as Ad:Tech, his opinion pieces and white papers (e.g. his thought leading 2005 IDM Journal paper entitled 'Customer Communities Herald New Ground Rules for Successful Marketing') and senior advisory roles on social media and digital marketing with various global brands.

www.knexusgroup.com

********************************

Get Netimperative updates on Twitter