The Wiki Turns 14

Yesterday was the 14th anniversary of the wiki’s inception.  The wiki format is a staple of the enterprise social software arsenal.  I wrote about why the wiki has been so successful and what that can teach us about designing collaboration systems over at the Gilbane Group Blog.  Please read the post there and leave a comment.

Echoing the Business Case for Enterprise Social Software

Socialtext’s Ross Mayfield blogged today about the ROI of Social Networking for TransUnion.  In spite of the title, the real news in the post is not the amount of ROI, which, in the case of TransUnion’s Socialtext deployment, has only been estimated, not proven.  Rather, the most powerful messages are echoes of two ideas that were expressed in my last post on this blog.

First, organizations are wary of employees using public social software to discuss business.  Companies are deploying enterprise social software to keep confidential information behind the firewall.  In Mayfield’s post, TransUnion CTO John Parkinson said he saw the need “to defend against too much of this [employee social networking] going on in public.”  Mayfield further underscores Parkinson’s mindset by writing,

“Since the company deals in credit reports, it wasn’t keen on employees gathering to talk shop on the public Web. So the IT team set up Socialtext inside the company firewall.”

Clearly, corporations view the use of public social software as a risk to the confidentiality of their business information.  I think we will see many more examples of this risk avoidance behavior in the future, and it may end up being the most compelling business case for deploying enterprise social software in the near term.

The second bit in Mayfield’s blog that echoes my previous post is the other reason TransUnion bought and deployed Socialtext software.  According to Mayfield, TransUnion’s ROI estimate is based on cost savings of avoided additional software purchases.  Fine, but what were those purchases (and the Socialtext investment as well) intended to do?  Provide new tools to help employees work around existing ones that didn’t allow them to perform productively!

“TransUnion knew it was time to provide an internal social networking tool when people started asking for permission to set up an employee group inside Facebook.”

Why did these employees want a Facebook group?  I do not know for sure, but I am confident that it was because Facebook would allow them to achieve a business objective that they could not meet using existing TransUnion applications and systems.  Bravo to Socialtext for providing a solution that will likely meet those employees’ needs in a more secure fashion.

This TransUnion example affirms what I stated in my previous post.  The real value employees gain by using enterprise social software is shown in their ability to get work done when other corporate systems fail them.

Why Your Business MUST Adopt Enterprise Social Software

Suw Charman-Anderson posted a thoughtful piece with the title Businesses will live to regret their social media ignorance today.  Her main point is that organizations that do not deploy enterprise social software behind the firewall will lose control of information as it spreads through public social media.

I agree with Suw.  If businesses want to retain some control over their information, they should provide secure, enterprise-ready versions of the specific types of collaboration and communication tools that employees want to use.  For example, if the risk of information leakage via Twitter is too high, the organization should deploy an enterprise microblogging application on its own servers (or subscribe to a SaaS offering hosted by a trusted vendor.)

While it isn’t her central thesis, the most interesting thing to me about Suw’s post is the two similar statements that she chose to publish in bold face.

“People see email as damage and route around it.

People see IT restrictions as damage and route around them.”

What Suw is describing, in a word, is work-arounds.  Employees invent work-arounds to clear hurdles such as poor user interfaces, broken business processes, and ill-informed business policies that exist in nearly every large organization.  The use of public social media by ever growing numbers of people within companies can be attributed, in large part, to the effectiveness of those tools at helping employees work around barriers to productivity.

And that is why your business must adopt enterprise social software.  Not because it provides a level of control over sensitive information, although it does do that.  The real and compelling reason to deploy  enterprise social software is because helps employees do their work.