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.

Is Your Head in the Cloud?

We most often use the term “cloud computing” in the context of applications — Software as a Service (SaaS) if you will.  Venkatesh Rao of the Xerox Innovation Group has coined a new term, “cloudworker”, which humanizes our concept of the cloud.  On his blog, RibbonFarm.com, Venkatesh defines a cloudworker as:

“the prototypical information worker of tomorrow.  He overachieves or coasts remotely, collaborates or backstabs virtually, and delivers his gold or garbage to a shifting long-tail micro-market defined only by his own talents or lack thereof.  The cloudworker manages personal microbrand equity and network social capital rather than a career.  Over a lifetime, through recessions and bubbles, he navigates fluidly back and forth between traditional paycheck employment, slash-work and full, untethered-to-health-insurance free agency.”

Venkatesh’s vision of a cloudworker meshes nicely with my views on Work 2.0, the changed and continuously shifting contract between employees and employers.  I’m undecided on the vialibility of the term that he has minted — I think cloudworker is too strongly tied to the cloud computing fad of the moment — but I’m highly sympathetic to the notion of knowledge workers shifting between regular employment, freelance work, and anything in between.  I have made those shifts several times in the last ten years and anticipate doing so again during my career.

The piece of Venkatesh’s definition of a cloudworker that resonates most strongly with me is his statement that “the cloudworker manages personal microbrand equity and network social capital rather than a career.”  In other words, building a strong network of colleagues in your area of expertise, developing your reputation within that network, and leveraging those relationships and their perception of your reputation is more important to work success than trying to climb the career ladder in an organization.

As I said in the initial post on this blog, “I have reached a point where the benefits of being an employee of an organized, legal entity (a corporation) and my ability to collaborate with others to address business opportunities and issues — independent of my employment — have reached equilibrium.  My employer offers some very attractive compensations for my client-facing work, namely a salary and strong benefits package.  However, I no longer rely exclusively on IBM for channels through which I can collaborate with others.  I can work and innovate with, learn from, influence, and lead others without that organizational affiliation, largely thanks to the Internet and social software.”

So, to me, Work 2.0 is about more than just the cloud.  Yes, the Internet is a critical enabler of the emerging way of working, but it is not the primary one.  People are always more important than technology.  The key to Work 2.0 is collaboration — specifically, the building of a solid network of peers and interacting with them to identify and respond to business opportunities.