Carol Rozwell

I attended Lotusphere 2012 this week. Actually, I attended LotusConnect, the event focused on letting customers tell their stories about how IBM’s products service the business. The case studies from notable organizations such as TD Bank, Children’s Hospital and Caterpillar were compelling. Some implementations were further along than others, but all of the speakers spoke enthusiastically about the promise of social that ignited their projects and the subsequent benefits they are receiving.

Here are a few of my observations from the case studies:

• Executive sponsorship is still a CSF. This is not news to anyone who’s ever been involved in any tech deployment that changed how people do their work (and one could argue that if the technology does not create or enable process improvement, then why are you bothering with it?). Social is bound to change who people interact with  to get their work done, so it’s essential to have a committed executive sponsor involved early on – one who has the clout to remove the organizational barriers that hamper changing calcified work practices. With social initiatives, a team of sponsors is even better. A team should be able to work process change issues in parallel instead of serially.
• Anyone can originate a social project – IT, LoB leader, team leader, project leader or senior exec. It doesn’t really matter who gets the inspiration and sets off to figure how how social tools can help people perform their work differently. What matters is having the desire to fix some collaborative work practice that people know could be done another way that is better than they are doing it today. Any person in any part of the organization can have that spark. They do, however, need to have the ability to convince others of the merit of their idea.
• Some faith is still required. As one speaker commented, “believe in the value, not the problem.” More people are familiar with social media paradigms than a year ago, or two years ago. But some aspects of social are still unfamiliar to many workers. And that smelly red herring about age being an adoption factor still persists. The speakers reinforced the point that if the “new” thing was better than the “old” thing, adoption would follow. I appreciated the distinction one speaker mentioned about the drive to deploy vs the drive to gain adoption of a new social software tool. This is not just an issue of semantics. The critical measureof success is not how many employees have “it” but how many employees use it. So if there is clarity on the positive work outcome to be achieved with social tools, then give it a go, see what happens and advertise the results.

There is much more to be said about the opportunities, as well as the risks of social media, but I’ll have to save those comments for another post. Or you could plan to come see my talk at the Portals, Content and Collaboration Summit in March. I will be presenting a new piece of research titled “Social Media Risk: It’s Not What You Think It Is.” I hope to see or hear from you then.

Also, if you would like a more detailed look at Lotusphere, check out Bill Ives’ blogs.

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Category: Change management Collaboration Knowledge management Social media Social networks community social software     Tags: Collaboration, Collaboration dynamics, Organizational liquidity, risk, Social media, Social networks, social software

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