Social networking in the
workplace has long moved beyond the concept of frivolous, into the
background environment of what people do during their days. Corporate
culture doesn’t yet acknowledge networking to be as essential as email,
say, but the change is happening, incrementing daily.
At Dovetail Software – given our development emphasis on support tools for Clarify CRM -
we tend to see the rise in social networking in terms of its customer
service and support (CS&S) value. As we wrote early in the year:
“The imperatives [i.e. to companies] to stop customer
churn and provide Customer Service and Support (CS&S) are driven by
customers themselves as they reveal their own networks of trust.” – The Social Networking Convergence With CRM
Larry Dignan at ZDNet this week writes about
enterprise social networking. A company called Trampoline proposes a
system that auto-populates itself with documents and relationships by
algorithmic trawling of the enterprise.
“Biddle says for enterprise social networking to
become as popular as something like Facebook it has to be manageable,
patchable and mesh well with group policies and privacy. Corporations
also want phased rollouts with social software. Overall, security is a
big concern.
”’Networks exist, but they are only good as the
people in them. The enterprise doesn’t know who’s good at what and what
they are doing. This is common at a large organization,’ says Biddle.
‘With social networking someone can switch jobs and be found six months
later.’
“Armstrong also adds that companies don’t need big
workflow changes to make social networking work. ‘The changes are more
subtle at the organizational level,’ he says.” – Peter Biddle: Enterprise social networking ready for lift-off
On the Web, millions of users with little to
lose form the proving ground for valuable technologies and systems,
while in the enterprise, C-level executives and IT managers require
relatively proven products to bring into their organizations.
Executives are both uncertain about adopting Web 2.0 technologies and enthusiastic. Consultants continue to tell CEOs to get with the Web 2.0 program, but it will be trusted vendors offering enabling packages that sway them all eventually.
In
this vein, Yahoo has just unveiled a collaborative environment
(complete with aggregation tools for lesson plan materials) for
teachers, who in this instance certainly would never have had the time
to develop such a system themselves using available Web tools.
“Setting the background, Weber noted that tech use in
education falls across a wide gradient-while students are generally
more wired than ever, teachers may be tech savants, total Luddites, or
anywhere in between. In their discussions with educators, Weber said,
they heard that teachers must spend large amounts of time outside of
their workday working on lesson plans and preparation, and they feel
disconnected from other teachers; after all, they can’t just walk out
of the classroom to chat around the water cooler, particularly at lower
grade levels.” – Hacking education with Yahoo! Teachers
Even so, people have to make social
networking work. What about age difference? Luis Suarez, one of the
most enthusiastic proponents of social networking as a knowledge
management system, thinks that age is less a factor than comfort zone.
As he writes in his ITtoolbox blog:
“I doubt it would be much an issue about age making
use of them, but more a culture thing. Would a mature workforce want to
change the way they have been working for years, even if that would
make them more effective, as opposed to how comfortable they are at the
moment in their own settled working environment? I doubt it. There
would be folks who would, but there would be a majority of them that
would reject changing their habits. So I am not sure it is an age issue
in here any longer. Plus there are plenty of solutions available out
there to tackle this problem, like mutual mentoring between the younger
and baby boomers generations” – Enterprise 2.0 – Fixing the Generation Gap
Social networking is not often perceived as
the harmonious cooperative union between software and people that it
is, but probably should be. The growth of social networking is affecting CRM, affecting customer behavior, and affecting the developers of software, such as ourselves, particularly as we find it bearing out our major design premise, that the user is king.
