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.

First, what I hope evolves from 2011 missteps into greater insight:

• During 2011, I talked with too many social media leaders who were still focused on the ‘media’ and not the ‘social.’ We are in the midst of a significant business disruption, but all too often the discussion centered on ‘should I have a facebook page or not?’ (You may want to see my blog on the top ten signals that indicate your management doesn’t get social media). Yes, this is still an issue. I did a workshop with a client before the holidays. It started out with the Business Gets Social scenario presentation in which Gartner clearly recommends that the choice of technology is the last of the eight building blocks social media leaders need to plan for. So when it came to the discussion of ‘what should we do for social?’ the workshop participants started arguing about whether their social strategy should be built using product A or product B. Hopefully this year the emphasis will be on the necessary behavior change to espouse social and humanize the enterprise.
• Last year, social was still just an add-on to existing business processes, not an integrated, organized effort. Gartner recommends that social media leaders explore how they can augment existing business processes with social. The critical question in my mind is how to use ‘1000 eyes’ (See the blog post). But too many social media initiatives are disconnected from other enterprise activities. Another real-life example ripped from the headlines (or rather my own experience): I got a tweet from a vendor asking if I was going to join their webinar. This is a vendor I’ve worked with for years, one who regularly emails me stuff, so someone in marketing knows I am on their distribution list. When I declined the invite to the webinar, the tweeter asked me to send them my email so they could send me the slides post-event. Ah, well. Hopefully, we will make some progress in this regard, too.

Here are a few social media trends for 2012 to ponder as you develop your plans:

• Emergence of what Gartner calls the nexus for four forces: The convergence of cloud, social, mobile and information into a unified set of forces shaping almost every IT-related decision. They key is that social does not live alone. (Gartner clients may want to read the report Predicts 2012: Four Forces Combine to Transform the IT Landscape)
• Increasing customer expectation for engagement via social channels. Here is the prediction from Jeff Mann and me: By 2014, refusing to communicate with customers via social channels will be as harmful as ignoring emails or phone calls is today. Let me know if you want the entire predicts report and I can send it to you.
• Increased interest in social analytics. This includes not only the collection of social intelligence information but also the organization competency to use the intelligence for more informed decision making. Yes, we’ve been talking about data-driven decision making for years, but now its feasible and there is additional insight to be gleaned from social network interactions.

The cool thing about a new year is that it gives us the chance to start over. I hope you are doing that with a joyful heart and a boatload of enthusiasm.

But every now and then I get a question that makes me wince. Someone asks a question 15 minutes into a 30 minute inquiry about an issue of critical and strategic importance. They hope for a simple solution to a wicked problem. They miss the point that these kinds of dilemmas cannot be solved with straight line analysis, more nuanced techniques are required (Gartner clients may want to check out Diane Morello’s report CIO Advisory: Why CIOs Are in the Thick of Wicked Problems and What They Should Do About Them or my report Use Storytelling to Solve Wicked Problems). A recent example came from a CEO who wanted to know which sales model he should adopt for the company: option A or option B.

This was a newer client, so I couldn’t tell if he really thought I could answer such a complicated issue with a few bromides or he was testing me (I hope it was the latter). So I suggested a series of questions that would need to be answered before attempting to give advice on the matter. And a longer amount of time to to create and consider options – at least longer than 15 minutes.

So often, though, we seek simple, short 15-minute solutions to problems that are really much more complicated than that. I once heard an experienced CEO comment that if she was only making those decisions when all it took was 15 minutes to decide on the course of action, then she wasn’t earning her salary. She could, she explained, schedule her calendar in 15 minutes increments so as to maximize the number of decisions she made during the course of a day. But then, she mused, she wouldn’t the making the kind of judgements that would be most valuable for her firm, her employees and other stakeholders.

Organizations around the globe are in the midst of a megachange as Business Gets Social. At a conceptual level, this change does not alter the fundamentals of human nature. Business has always been about people to people transactions. But social business is expected to rattle some entrenched organizational models as decision making becomes more inclusive and transparency “outs” conversations previously held in private.

Those leaders who appreciate the magnitude of this change and put in the effort to devise responses commensurate with complications they encounter as Business Gets Social should come out quite nicely.

But as Thomas Alva Edison commented: “Most people don’t recognize opportunity when it comes, because it’s usually dressed in overalls and looks a lot like work.”

Let me know what you think. Are there short cuts to decision making that work? How does your organization cope with wicked problems? Respond here or via twitter @CRozwell

]]> http://blogs.gartner.com/carol_rozwell/2011/12/15/easy-answers-dont-solve-tough-problems/feed/ 1 http://blogs.gartner.com/carol_rozwell/2011/12/06/social-media-doesnt-change-business-basics-but/ http://blogs.gartner.com/carol_rozwell/2011/12/06/social-media-doesnt-change-business-basics-but/#comments Tue, 06 Dec 2011 20:23:39 +0000 Carol Rozwell http://blogs.gartner.com/carol_rozwell/?p=698 It’s interesting how so many client inquires are initially described as questions about social media, but then really turn out to be variations of more traditional issues like collaboration, knowledge management or community enablement. The common denominator among these topics is the desire to use technology to make people more effective in their jobs. The promise of anything tagged “social” is the hope that technology will work for the worker, not against them.

Nonetheless, some folks still stumble over the “social” part of social media, social software or social business. They need reassurance that the same business conduct principles that applied to their organization and to the people working for them from the pre-social business era still are valid. For example, anyone who’s ridden a hospital elevator has probably seen the admonition to medical personnel reminding them to refrain from discussing patient information in public places. This rule of business conduct applies as much in elevators as on the social web.

Perhaps the concern about whether the rules have changed or not stems from some of the negative press generated when someone does something silly or stupid using social media. It is true that social amplifies whatever is going well or poorly. And it spreads information quickly and indiscriminately. After all, social networks are messy.

Organizations struggle to understand how social media will impact their processes. We are early on in the uptake of internal and external social media. There is still much confusion about what it means to become a social business. Process impact will become more apparent the more we gain experience with socialized business activities. What remains consistent is the business conduct rules. What we advised employees as “the right thing to do” in the days of phones and email still stands.

But.

The “but” is that where there is confusion, there is the opportunity to remind and re-educate. If some people think that social changes the business conduct equation, then this belief needs to be addressed. One approach I’m researching for a case study is a training program that puts employees into use case scenarios and lets them figure out what to do in each circumstance. It’s been successful because the training gives employees the skills to deal with real-life situations rather than abstract information on what social media is.

Those people designing or redesigning their collaboration, knowledge management or community enablement programs may want to keep this in mind as they plan their roll out strategy. The business basics that govern your organization’s conduct in the market place – values, legal and fiduciary requirements, ethical treatment, etc. – retain their importance as business gets social. But, if employees are confused, it’s a great time to remind them of what the business conduct rules are and why they are there.

First, a bit of explanation for each. The Immersion Day was designed to give students, faculty and invited guests a glimpse of what various people who study social media think about its impact on business today and in the future. While many people attended in person on the Fuqua campus at Duke University, more than five times as many watched the video stream. In addition to my presentation, there were sessions from IBM, PwC, McKinsey and Cisco.

My summarized impression of the day is that social business is already a reality in practice but that the organizational change required to deal with this significant shift lags social adoption.

The Cisco Collaboration Summit exposed attendees to the company’s collaboration vision and plans for bringing products to market that support the vision. Their watchwords for collaboration included mobile, social and visual. Throughout the two days, attendees saw numerous practical uses of technology with an emphasis on video.

My summary of the summit is the need to collaborate across devices and applications, with employees, business partners and customers. In short, no one expects their only collaboration device will be a PC, just like no one expects the only mechanism for sharing content will be an email with file attachments.

Which brings me back to the Immersion Day. I will admit it was a shock to learn that so many more “attendees” watched the video stream than came to the actual event. Were they as engaged as the people who were there in person? We will never know. Although I am not sure I could prove that the people sitting in seats in the auditorium were any more “there” than the people online. When I asked whether any of the people in the auditorium were solely engaged in the day’s event, no one answered yes. (Duh)

What is certain is that social business includes multiple technology modalities that can be accessed in real time and after the fact. It forces the integration of interaction methods and devices, as well as content types. And it needs to do so in a way that builds on – not just layers on – the technology investments in mission critical applications organizations have already made.

Additionally, these events confirm that the emergence of video for business communication and video accessed via mobile devices is underway. At the very least, this means we need to add the ability to be effective communicators in a visual medium to our list of skills.

I’m not known for engaging in definitions debates. While it is important to be clear and accurate in one’s communication, I derive little joy from discussing how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. What is important is not what term is used (as my friends in the mid-west say, “it don’t make no never mind”) – but clearly defining the value you expect to get from the initiative. The critical questions that need to be answered are “what do you want to achieve?” and “how will this make your target constituency’s life easier?” Both of these questions must be answered with a very high degree of specificity if the initiative will be successful. (Gartner clients may want to read my research note describing a process for doing this.)

In most cases when I talk with clients about KM, collaboration or social media, what they want to gain is similar: they want to get more benefit from the information assets inside or outside their organizations. The complication is that as the problems they are hoping to solve by applying these knowledge assets increase in complexity, so does the likelihood that the knowledge needed to solve them cannot be neatly codified.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that I’ve been a member of the Boston KM Forum for more years than I care to think about. The KM Forum is ably guided by Lynda Moulton and Larry Chait. Periodically we will discuss whether a name change for the group is required. After all, KM has certainly changed a lot over the past decade. But somehow we just haven’t come up with a better term and so we stick with what we have (and then of course there would be the expense of changing all the fancy stationery (grin)). And we acknowledge that topics that fit under the KM banner include content management, learning, innovation and collaboration.

So don’t worry too much about what you call that project that aims to get more value from information assets. Instead, spend the time looking for ways to get people better connected and allow them to filter out the useful knowledge from wealth of information that surrounds them.

Question: How would you characterize your organization’s social media initiatives? 142 people answered this question.

19% – We’re trying to figure out what to do, but haven’t implemented anything yet.

23% – We’re experimenting with social media internally.

28% – We’re experimenting with social media externally.

23% – We’re well underway with a number of initiatives.

7% – We’re old pros with social media.

Question: What is the top reason your organization is investing in social media? 155 people answered this question.

36% – Strengthen customer relationships

30% – Enhance brand awareness

6% – Share information with business partners

25% – Help people find and work better with each other

3% – Meet CEO or board objectives

Question: Who is leading your social media initiatives? 168 people answered this question.

27% – Multiple lines of business

10% – Social media steering committee

18% – IT

35% – Marketing

10% – Other support orgs (PR, HR, etc.)

A quick scan of the results reveals that most attendees believe social media has applicability for their organizations and they are testing to see what it is. Initiatives remain in the hands of marketing, although more CEOs or board members are sitting up and taking notice of the strategic potential of social business. For most, social media programs are not yet guided by a steering committee.

I hope some of you will join me in Orlando for Symposium ITxpo to hear more about the impact and potential of social media as Business Gets Social.

A more productive way to think about the disruptive opportunity of social is to explore the places were the network can be brought to bear to improve, enhance and enlighten any business activity. Processes such as customer service, R&D and supply chain can all benefit from the insight and experience of people inside and outside the organization.

The question I suggest leaders of social business initiatives ask themselves is “where can 1000 eyes be brought to bear to make the business activity run better, faster or cheaper?”

Credit: DeMarchi Media

This is the question that will lead to better results than asking whether you need a Facebook page. That decision can come later, after you’ve figured out where the 1000 eyes can best be put to use.

If you would like to discuss this or other topics related to Business Gets Social, join us for the Gartner Twitter Chat. It will take place October 4, at 3 ET on Twitter with Anthony Bradley, Elise Olding and me. Join us on Twitter and follow #GartnerChat, and hosts @BradleyAnthonyJ, @CRozwell, @EliseOlding and @Gartner_inc.

I find that some community shepherds who measure the value of the community solely based on the number of people who actively participate in discussions may be judging themselves too harshly. They are disappointed when only a small percentage – often no more than 10-20% – of the people on the meeting invite list show up at virtual meetings or contribute to community discussions via email and collaboration tools.

If they just look at the percent engagement, they might miss the role a community plays in sharing information to all those other people who “lurk” on the fringes. For many of us, those ‘other’ communities where we lurk provide us with valuable insight even if we don’t actively participate. There are many situations where knowing a project is underway or knowing who is knowledgeable about a topic is just enough information. When the time comes, I may not be able to handle the issue, but I will know who does. Or at least I will know the person to ask who knows the person who knows.

I’ll provide one example of how lurkers like me lost out when a manager pulled a plug on a discussion. There was a pretty heated exchange going on in a community of practice among people who were trying to work out a consensus position on a topic. Using the community as a forum, the back and forth discussion uncovered key facts and raised some very interesting points. However, when a senior manager closed the conversation down before the community resolved its different perspectives, the opportunity for learning was extinguished.

In an organization that cites the desire to increase knowledge sharing as a goal of its collaboration program, the lurkers can play a valuable role. Lurkers are often the boundary spanners that spread information to other communities. So don’t diss the lurkers – feed their need to know.

The seduction of social often plays out in the context of a social, collaboration or knowledge management program like this: some senior person says, “we need to install social app X. It will (insert your benefits statement here) for example, “we need to buy social app X because it will make use more collaborative.” The social initiative program manager buys social app X and installs it. Of course, there is no need to provide training because “nobody ever needed Facebook training.” After the initial flurry of excitement, usage gradually declines. In 9 – 12 months, no one but the hardiest tech pioneers use social app X.

It’s fascinating to see some variation of this scenario play out over and over again. The details are a little different from case to case – it may be social app Y that is deployed rather than social app X – but the results are the same.

If you’ve read my blogs or research, you know that the “provide and pray” approach does not work. Social must be focused on solving a thorny business problem and the worker at whom it’s targeted must see personal value in what the technology is offering them. So there is a big risk of failure when social is deployed for social’s sake.

But there is another dangerous risk to be reckoned with.

In many organizations, social is being championed by people who see the value in de-leveling some of the traditional corporate structure and allowing anyone to talk with anyone. But this meritocratic view also scares a management team that is classically trained and steeped in Taylor-esque approaches to work.

The big risk is that if these well-intentioned but poorly supported social experiments go forward and fail, it’s too easy for those managers to say, “see, I told you so.” Their view that social is just a waste of time is reinforced and the possibility to attempt another social experiment anytime soon is greatly reduced. In fact, experience shows that the next most will again approve a social project is two years hence, “because we all know what happened last time . . . ”

So if you are contemplating a social project, plan it well. If you have a social project that is languishing, get it back on track.