Adoption of Social Software
Today I give a presentation to a New Zealand based customer on how to promote the adoption of Social Networking tools within the enterprise.
The customer is a good one from a Social networking point of view as the team has extensive experience of knowledge management and understand what they are trying to achieve e.g. efficiency and productivity of employees Their deployment strategy is essentially sound and my involvement is to provide mentoring and consultancy on how to get things moving and pointing out areas that require additional focus in order to be successful.
My focus areas for this customer can be split into two:
- Adoption
- Business value measurement
Adoption:
Adoption of IT tools within an organization share common characteristics. To enable an organization to adopt Social Software is similar to enabling a company to adopt Business Process Management or Enterprise Content Management tools. The software has to
- Solve a problem
- reduce business risk
- make things easier / quicker
- reduce costs
- stacks up against business value metrics such as RoI, NPV etc
For me, the core value of social software to an organization is its ability to increase the employees engagement with their work activities, colleagues and ultimately how it changes the organizations culture. This is why many social software projects are linked to organizational change or transformation.
- how easy is it for colleagues to connect with each other. Mechanisms (tools) and rules (formal and informal) exist on how I can easily do this. e.g. I can pick up the phone, open an instant messaging chat session, initiate a web/video conference from my desktop etc..
- How easy is it for employees to access information and data. e.g. using common tools such as a browser and windows explorer can employees access content within shared team rooms, central content repositories and check in and check out those documents to ensure one “truth” of the document
- how easy is it for employees to produce and share information e.g. using OpenOffice and Microsoft Office tools can I create, edit, save, version and share documents with colleagues and teams without sending large attachments and lots of email!
- How easy it is for employees to access business processes? e.g. utilizing common tools can the employees interact with key business processes such HR financial, sales systems?
Business Value Measurement
Business value measurement tends to mean RoI (Return on Investment)and there area couple of ways of doing this with social software. I have blogged about this on previous posts which might be of interest.
- Soft or anecdotal RoI and
- Hard RoI.
Soft RoI or Anecdotal RoI
Before we start our Social Software pilot we ask a bunch of questions to our user population that relate to the capabilities that will be addressed. These questions might be along the line of :
“Describe the process you follow in contacting a colleague. “
An example of a response could be
“I search my email for my colleagues contact details, I call them on the telephone and we have a conversation. If my colleague is not available I leave a voicemail and wait for them to call me back. If the request is urgent I follow it up with an email.”
From this we can ascertain units of work:
- I search for my colleagues contact details
- I use the telephone
- I leave a voicemail
- I send an email
Next we run through our PoC / Pilot and follow best practices as shown below.
Step 1: Identify the business goals
Step 2: Choose a pilot audience
Step3: Locate your Advocates
Step 4: Conduct a preassessment
Step 5: Train the Advocates
Step 6: Integrate with other applications
Step 7: Expand and Advertise
Step 8: Set-up Checkpoints
Step 9: Track usage and value of ROI
We then redo the survey and see if there has been any difference in the way the employee has changed their working habits.
“Describe the process you follow in contacting a colleague. “
The answer might now be:
“I look at my colleagues presence awareness within the email client and if it is yellow (in a meeting) I don’t contact them. I set a quick alert for the system to prompt me when my colleague becomes available. When they are available I start up an instant messaging chat sessions and ask the question, if they answer the question that work activity is completed.”
Another example:
“How do you find information?”
Answer before social software tool could be:
“I send an email to a couple of people that might be able to help me. Sometimes they send me an attachment but often the information is not the most accurate. I then try and find out who has the most accurate copy of the document which involves multiple emails, telephone calls and voicemails. Eventually I find the latest version and save it on my personal drive.”
After deploying the social software into production the answer might be…
“It depends on the information I need. We now have a shared team room using Lotus Quickr where we store all documents relating to a project. I can see all the different document versions so I know which document is the latest version.”
From these examples we can calculate the time it takes to do a collaborative activity before and after the tools have been implemented. Using this information we can make some assumptions about the number of people that perform these types of collaborative activities, we know the average salary of an employee so we can take a rough guess on the time and money saved by the organization by implementing these tools.
Hard RoI
With Hard RoI we take a critical business process and analyse the hell out of it. We then implement Social Software tools and modify the way that the process is executed by employees. We can them align the ROI of the social networking tools against the improvement in execution of the critical business process.
Simple eh!? If you are seeking some assistnace with proving RoI or looking for some mentoring then please drop me a line at chris (AT) chrissparshott.com.
I want to share with you the presentation I gave the customer’s Social Software deployment team and their Corporate Communications department, comments appreciated.
