HR + Social = Like

 Social is big, and getting bigger.

Social is sweeping into the enterprise with astonishing speed. Corporations, government agencies and nonprofits are using social tools such as blogs, wikis and Twitter-like activity streams to collaborate internally, with both customers and the general public. It's an undeniable trend and it's quickly picking up speed.

The opportunity is immense. Most enterprise technology is in the business of automating human tasks: taking the creativity out of work and replacing it with rigid, formal process. Social software does just the opposite; it fosters, encourages and empowers the natural creativity of human beings working with each other towards a common goal.

Yvette Cameron of Constellation Research describes it this way:

For the first time, technologies are becoming available that better align the way people naturally work and think. As humans, we're social creatures. Until recently, technologies didn't really support that. A lot of the processes that we use in our business applications are about automating paperwork, as opposed to really fostering collaboration [and the] rapid discovery of information; getting to the people, content and the knowledge that's needed to get work done."

Enterprise social software is key to businesses of all sizes because it enables new relationships to be created amongst your employees. Classic examples where enterprise social software can help your company and your employees become more productive include: getting a question answered by the most knowledgeable person, joining a new cross-functional team or getting help resolving a complex customer problem.

Who Owns Social in the Enterprise?

Most enterprise technologies have natural owners inside the enterprise. Sales owns sales force automation. Finance owns the financial software. Marketing owns marketing automation. It’s not exactly rocket science.

But social software is different. It doesn’t map to a single business process. Social software is all about unlocking the potential of all employees across an entire organization — whether they’re in Sales, Marketing, R&D, Product, Support, Operations or whatever.

While social software may be new, human beings aren’t. We've been walking the earth for about 200,000 years, give or take. What's new is that for the first time we have the tools to collaborate effectively at large scale, without the benefit of physical proximity; and when we collaborate, each of our efforts becomes exponentially more valuable because we build on each other.

Large organizations are also nothing new, and for the past hundred or so years most of them have created a special group whose sole purpose is to optimize for the value of its people. This group is called Human Resources, but is better known as HR.

HR and enterprise social software were made for each other. Both are in the same business of making talent more productive.

“Aha!” you say, “But isn’t everyone in the enterprise trying to make talent more productive? So really each line of business should own social for itself!”

But remember that enterprise social is all about network effects. Social networks like Facebook and Twitter succeed precisely because everyone is on the same platform. People participate in the network because everyone else is participating. There’s no solution without scale. And the same is true in the enterprise. It’s only when we get everyone on a common platform that companies can offer a compelling value proposition.

 

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Source : cmswire[dot]com

The $1.3 Trillion Price Of Not Tweeting At Work

On June 6, Larry Ellison--CEO of Oracle, one of the largest and most advanced computer technology corporations in the world--tweeted for the very first time. In doing so, he joined a club that remains surprisingly elite. Among CEOs of the world’s Fortune 500 companies, a mere 20 have Twitter accounts. Ellison, by the way, hasn’t tweeted since.

As social media spreads around the globe, one enclave has proven stubbornly resistant: the boardroom. Within the C-suite, perceptions remain that social media is at best a soft PR tool and at worst a time sink for already distracted employees. Without a push from the top, many of the biggest companies have been slow to take the social media plunge.

A new report from McKinsey Global Institute, however, makes the business case for social media a little easier to sell. According to an analysis of 4,200 companies by the business consulting giant, social technologies stand to unlock from $900 billion to $1.3 trillion of value. At the high end, that approaches Australia’s annual GDP. How’s that for a bottom line?

Savings comes from some unexpected places. Two-thirds of the value unlocked by social media rests in “improved communications and collaboration within and across enterprises,” according to the report. Far from a distraction, in other words, social media proves a surprising boon to productivity.

Companies are embracing social tools--including internal networks, wikis and real-time chat--for functions that go way beyond just marketing and community building. R&D teams brainstorm products, HR vets applicants, sales fosters leads, and operations and distribution forecasts and monitors supply chains.

Behind this laundry list is a more hefty benefit. Social technologies have the potential to free up expertise trapped in departmental silos. High-skill workers can now be tapped company-wide. Managers can find out “which employees have the deepest knowledge in certain subjects, or who last contributed to a project and how to get in touch with them quickly,” says New York Times tech reporter Quentin Hardy. Just cutting email out of the picture in favor of social sharing translates to a productivity windfall as “more enterprise information becomes accessible and searchable, rather than locked up as ‘dark matter’ in inboxes.”

Among the most promising (and heretofore least hyped) new social technologies are tools like Yammer (recently snapped up by Microsoft for $1.2 billion), which bring Facebook-like functionality into the office. Social-savvy employees post queries and comments to internal conversation threads and coworkers offer feedback, crowdsourcing solutions. Content can be shared and searched, so the same issues don’t resurface. Meanwhile, virtual groups offer a more interactive alternative than email or phones.

Interestingly, the report suggest that tools like Yammer are the tip of the iceberg. Right now, only five percent of all communications and content use in the U.S. happens on social networks, mainly in the form of content sharing and online socializing. But McKinsey analysts point out that almost any human interaction in the workplace can be "socialized"--endowed with the speed, scale, and disruptive economics of the Internet.

It seems noteworthy that the report’s conclusions have been echoed of late from the most authoritative of places: Wall Street. In the last year, the world’s largest enterprise software companies--Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Adobe and even Ellison’s own Oracle--have spent upward of $2.5 billion snatching up social media tools to add to their enterprise suites. Even Twitter-phobic CEOs may have a hard time ignoring that business case.

--Author Ryan Holmes is the CEO of HootSuite, a social media management system with four million users, including 79 of the Fortune 100 companies.

Source : fastcompany[dot]com