{"id":1382,"date":"2012-08-13T21:23:36","date_gmt":"2012-08-13T19:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.socialenterprise.it\/?p=1382"},"modified":"2012-08-13T21:23:36","modified_gmt":"2012-08-13T19:23:36","slug":"unlocking-the-potential-of-social-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.socialenterprise.it\/index.php\/2012\/08\/13\/unlocking-the-potential-of-social-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Unlocking the Potential of Social Business"},"content":{"rendered":"
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In the early ’80s we had\u00a0groupware<\/a>, forums, mailing lists and wikis.\u00a0In 2006 we discovered\u00a0Enterprise 2.0<\/a>\u00a0as a collaborative extension of the company cutting across silos and departments, in a more open, transparent and spontaneous way.\u00a0In 2009-2010, we finally entered the phase of\u00a0social business<\/a>\u00a0with the crumbling of barriers separating the internal and the external of the organization and the deployment of collaboration inside processes.<\/p>\n

Despite increasing expenditure forecasts in social software ($ 4.6B in 2013<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0$ 6.4B in 2016<\/a>\u00a0according to Forrester), except for the success stories, famous commentators such as\u00a0Sameer Patel<\/a>,\u00a0Charlene Li<\/a>,\u00a0Laurie Buczek<\/a>,\u00a0Dion Hinchcliffe and Dennis Howlett<\/a>\u00a0have recently noted\u00a0an unexpected delay and in some cases an explicit skepticism about the \u00a0introduction of participative approaches by\u00a0<\/strong>large companies.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Although according to McKinsey, 72% of organizations have already deployed at least one collaborative tool, the level of actual use is much lower.\u00a0To get an idea Forrester stated that only 12% of information workers in late 2011 had access to enterprise social networking while only 8% actually did use it weekly.<\/p>\n

Looking at projects we have faced at least 6 reasons of resistance during the last few years<\/p>\n

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  1. IT and management lack of knowledge:<\/strong>\u00a0the\u00a0initial reluctance on the part of IT<\/a>\u00a0and the still low awareness on the part of top management regarding Social Business both at a strategic level and at a purely operational one.\u00a0Inertia goes up to 49% for IT managers and up to 64% for the top management<\/li>\n
  2. Unclear vision and results:<\/strong>\u00a0the glaring\u00a0lack of linkage between business goals, metrics<\/a>\u00a0and initiatives launched.\u00a0Up to 82% of companies do not measure or focuses more on the engagement than on actual business returns.\u00a0Even those who try to quantify the business outcomes\u00a0often report modest results<\/a><\/li>\n
  3. Barriers due to climate and culture:<\/strong>\u00a0a poor climate and decades of management practices that\u00a0are anything but encouraging to<\/a>\u00a0the dynamics of engagement<\/a>. About 80% of employees are still not fully engaged<\/li>\n
  4. Distance between social and processes:<\/strong>\u00a0a deep\u00a0gap between bottom-up participation and business applications \/ current work flows<\/a><\/li>\n
  5. The dynamics of change:<\/strong>\u00a0a poor understanding of the human propensity to change<\/a>\u00a0at all levels of aggregation: individual, team, organization causing peaks of 72% in resistance from users.<\/li>\n
  6. Need for a carefully designed adoption strategy:<\/strong>\u00a0the lack of\u00a0adoption of strategies<\/a>\u00a0focused on people, scalable and with the right buy-in.\u00a0The chances of success will be surely limited if only\u00a0a little more than 10% of the budget<\/a>\u00a0is devoted to work on people rather than technology<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Faced with such large barriers, probably impossible to overcome in some companies, it may be the right time to ask ourselves if the battle we are fighting, as well as being long and difficult, will bring a large enough premium\u00a0to justify the effort.\u00a0If, in short, the Social Enterprise is the future of business and organizational design or more of an utopia that won’t ever see the light.<\/p>\n

    Even though I’m afraid I still do not know the answer, some results on the future of business and social business recently published by McKinsey (The Social Economy: Unlocking value and productivity through social technologies<\/a>) and Deloitte \/ MIT (Social Business: What Companies Are Really Doing?<\/a>) give us hope.<\/p>\n

    \"\"<\/p>\n

    At a more operational level, Deloitte and MIT emphasize a:<\/p>\n