Social media is not just for fun – it can transform your business

a whitepaper from ComputerWeeklyCW +

Social media is being used in business whether the IT department likes it or not. A well-executed social computing strategy empowers employees to support and service newly empowered customers. And

companies with empowered employees have a significant competitive advantage in the socially connected world. This six-page Buyer’s Guide to Social Media explains why CIOs and senior IT professionals have a prime opportunity to rethink core business processes and examine how to use social computing to create advantages for their business.

Contents

Social media is coming, ready or not page 2

Social media technology is finding its way into business. Cliff Saran looks at how IT departments are adapting.

A CIO’s guide to establishing social media policy page 3

An organisation’s social media strategy must put people first, writes Nigel Fenwick.

Collaboration in the 21st century workforce page 5

BT is hoping its social network will hike employees’ productivity, writes Bill Goodwin.

These articles were originally published in Computer Weekly magazine in August 2010. To print this document, select “Shrink to printable area” or similar in your print menu.

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CW Buyer’s guidesocial media

Social media is coming, ready or notSocial media technology is finding its way into business. Cliff Saran looks at how IT departments are adapting

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Social media is being used in business whether the IT department likes it or not. IT can no longer justify ban-

ning Facebook or Twitter under the premise of maintaining old-school perimeterised enterprise security, which is increasingly out of step with the way leading organisations want to work internally and with their business partners.

Analyst firm Gartner says wikis are the most widely used social software technology in businesses, with full or production deployments at more than 40% of organisations surveyed. Services to find the location of an expert, social networking tools, and social tagging and bookmarking are less widely adopted, but almost 10% of organisations surveyed report full deployments.

Ted Schadler, vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, says, “More than 60% of information workers have better machines at home than at work.” For instance, people can use applications such as TweetDeck, which takes the power of Twitter and puts it in their pocket. Such software is not readily available in the enterprise.

IT managers should look at how consumers use IT to determine the direction business software should

take, particularly in terms of enabling collaboration.

In-house social toolsMichiel Boreel, CTO at electronic component supplier Sogenti, has created a Face book-like environment with micro-blogging, allowing staff to tell others what they are doing. The site provides all the social tools staff need in one place, including wikis and blogs to support innovation.

“We are in a competitive world. We have to drive creativity. If we

know who knows what, we can innovate,” he says.

Boreel believes social media has democratised innovation. “We wanted to make topics open to attract people. It is not about creating a closed-off business community. People outside of the board also have good ideas. Innovation is all about seeing opportunity. You want people who are engaged in the goals of your organisation,” he says.

The challenge is getting buy-in from middle management, says

Boreel. At Sogenti, middle manage-ment is not using the social media platform. “I get e-mails from middle managers who say, ‘someone is on the platform working on a new some-thing, and you didn’t tell me...’ That’s not my problem,” he says.

Bottom-up approachStaff at the company were already using public tools such as Facebook for social networking, and Boreel says the decision to use Sogenti’s social tools to support innovation could not simply be mandated from the top down.

“We took a bottom-up way of think-ing. We went to Facebook and Linked-In and scanned for staff. We found 400 active users and asked them if they would become early adopters. Most said yes. We gave them some training and they were part of the whole design of the platform,” he says.

Testimony to the success of his approach is that today the platform has 3,000 active users a week and 1,000 daily users.

However, there is a downside to success. Facebook may have millions of users, but how well can an internal system cope? “The more people who use it, the more it costs,” says Boreel.

Despite this, social media should not be discarded by IT. Nigel Fen-wick, vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester Research, urges CIOs to examine how they might leverage social computing in the company’s core processes to create advantages for the business. ■

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BPVA taps workforce for innovation with social toolsFernando Summers, head of information and knowledge management at financial organisation BPVA, has introduced social media tools at the company to support the needs of employees across 52 countries.

“We wanted to empower them with their own tools to solve problems,” he says.

The project started five years ago. The first tool that BPVA introduced was an experimental blog, which was part of the innovation department. The department wanted to find out how innovation could work in a traditional bank, so it opened up the innovation blog to 110,000 employees.

“We started asking employees for innovative things to do and they started sharing ideas and launching projects themselves,” says Summers.

The blog started small, with 60 people using it over a three-month period. Summers says, “Before launch we

had a small community from different parts of BPVA all talking to each other in a very democratic way. Everyone should talk with their own name. There were no anony-mous users or nicknames.”

He says the blog has enabled democratic communica-tions. “A little guy from Peru can talk to the CEO of the bank,” says Summers.

BPVA’s risk department also launched a blog to explain what the department does in an informal way. “People started getting interested in the risk department. One long-term employee discovered the blog and started telling people about her experiences, which she would not have been able to do previously,” says Summers.

He does not see social media in the enterprise as a security risk. “People just need to recognise that if they say something stupid the whole company can see,” he says.

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Social computing is a social structure in which technol-ogy puts power in commu-nities, not institutions.

The term “social” holds the prom-ise of a customer-driven business model in which customers influence business strategy and where employ-ees respond to customer needs. Yet, despite all the hype around the tech-nologies, the social computing revo-lution has barely had an impact on IT and the CIO.

Although the definition of social computing focuses on technology as shifting power to the people and

CIOs should take a leadership role in the transition, helping broker the changes needed across the business and garner executive support to take advantage of social computing

>>

away from the institution, from an IT perspective it is important to focus on the social component of the defi-nition. Rapidly growing communities have fundamentally shifted our social structure – a shift that will take a generation to play out.

Our synchronous communications have evolved from mainly face-to-face and phone conversations to include instant messaging of one form or another (eg AIM, Twitter, SMS, Facebook, etc). In this always-connected society, we are developing new ways to share knowledge and use the wealth of information at our fingertips. Generation Y is leading the charge, as they significantly outpace older workers’ adoption of smart-phones, SMS texting and micro-blogging services such as Twitter.

What started as a social pastime has quickly evolved into a staple in

the workplace. In fact, in a recent study of social media users, respond-ents cited multiple work-related reasons for using social media.

CIOs lead social strategiesCIOs have a prime opportunity to rethink core business processes and examine how to use social computing to create advantages for the business. CIOs should take a leadership role in this transition, helping broker the changes needed across the organisa-tion and garner executive support to take advantage of social computing.

Success in social computing depends on following a change- management methodology research company Forrester calls “Post”. This methodology puts an understanding of the people the community aims to serve ahead of determining the objectives, strategy and technology.

Step 1: Understand peopleThe first step in this methodology is to understand the people you are looking to engage. In developing a framework for internal collaboration in a large organisation, this means profiling the employees (and partners if they are participating).

While most employee populations might be expected to follow the pro-file of the national online population, there may be significant differences based on company demographics.

Developing successful communi-ties requires an understanding of the motivations behind participation in social communities.

The profile of the workforce will tell you what is possible with social computing. No matter what the ap-plication, any form of social collabo-ration typically requires a large user base (more than 1,000) to be effective.

The reason for this is that not all people are destined to be contribu-tors to the social community, with only 30% to 40% of most social site members actively contributing con-tent to the community. Out of 1,000 active members, a community based on the typical US population would have just 130 creators and 190 critics,

CW Buyer’s guidesocial media

A CIO’s guide to establishing social media policyAn organisation's social media strategy must put people first, writes Nigel Fenwick

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Allowing members to build small groups on the fly to work on a problem may help promote collaboration

<<with the remaining active members consuming content but not adding to it in any way.

Step 2: Determine objectives Although a single, targeted objec-tive is crucial for a well-executed interactive marketing campaign, it is restrictive when considering how to leverage social communities in the organisation at large.

Early examples of successful social communities in organisations dem-onstrate the ability to achieve multi-ple objectives because these commu-nities provide multiple layers of social activities. Common internally focused community objectives include: innovating, collaborating, supporting, learning and archiving.

Step 3: Develop a strategyYour objective determines what busi-ness goal you want to accomplish.

Having decided on the objective, you can move on to strategy: How will you accomplish the goals? In particular, social strategy revolves around answering the question, “How do I want to change the relationships between people in the social ecosys-tem (customers, suppliers, or staff)?”

By focusing on the relationships between the people in the commu-nity, and not the technology, CIOs can keep an eye on the long-term changes that matter.

Communication strategyThis may be as simple as sending short messages to others in the com-munity to let them know what is happening. For example, a micro-blogging community built internally for employees behind a firewall would allow staff to share informa-tion about what they are working on.

A communication strategy ad-dresses the question of how members of the community will share informa-tion with each other. This forms the foundation of supporting most social objectives in step two above, but it is unlikely to be successful on its own.

Although a communicate strategy might be used in isolation for a document-archiving community, it is typically used in conjunction with one or more of the other strategies.

Contribution strategyThis strategy fulfils the esteem needs. Simple question-and-answer

communities provide one example of a contribution strategy, but to fully tap the potential, the technology should support the ability for mem-bers to give kudos to each other and for contributions to be rewarded in some way.

To be supportive, a community must offer both the ability to post questions and to give answers; the strategy should address how the community will make this process easy for members and what the resulting change in relationship between members will be.

For example, a community of busy executives is unlikely to succeed if it relies on web access. Instead, allow-ing members to interact over e-mail updates would greatly increase the community’s utility.

Creation strategyThe creation strategy must determine the forms of creativity available to members. The strategy should

determine how members will be able to come together to collaborate on a challenging problem.

For example, allowing members to upload video may help stimulate cre-ativity, or allowing members to build small groups on the fly to work on a problem may promote collaboration.

However, to establish a vibrant social community, it is unlikely that a creation strategy alone will succeed.

Why use social computing?

Combining a creation strategy with a connect strategy allows members of the community to more easily find the people with whom they should collaborate. ■

this is an excerpt from The CIO’s Guide To Social Computing Leadership by Nigel Fenwick, vice-president and principal analyst at Forrester Research www.forrester.com

Hierarchy of social needs

Source: Forrester Research

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The BT profile page promises to make it easier for staff to find the right experts for projects they’re working on

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Collaboration in the 21st century workforceBT is hoping its social network will hike employees' productivity, writes Bill Goodwin

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BT is rolling out Facebook-style social networking services to its 100,000 employees, in a move it

says will help staff collaborate more effectively on projects, whether they are in the office or working remotely.

The company says the system will lead to significant gains in productiv-ity and help the organisation keep track of the skills of its workforce.

BT is an early adopter of Micro-soft’s business collaboration plat-form, Sharepoint 2010. It is using the platform to build advanced social networking and collaboration tools,

which will be rolled out across the organisation between now and the end of the year.

The project is part of a wider pro-gramme that will see BT replace between 30,000 and 40,000 Windows XP desktops with Windows 7 by the end of 2010. At the same time, the company plans to upgrade from Office 2007 to Office 2010, in a move that it predicts will bring further productivity benefits.

Efficiency gainsPeter Scott, BT’s chief technology officer for end-user technology, is responsible for providing these infrastructure services.

He says BT is such a large organisa-tion that even small improvements to its IT infrastructure can bring huge efficiency gains when multiplied

across the whole organisation.“We have challenges around our

cost base, where we want to reduce overall how much it costs us to do things. We want to do things in a smarter way. We want the outcome to be better than before,” he says.

“A toolset like Sharepoint, which allowed us to underpin all of that, we saw as a very powerful business enabler,” says Scott.

The company has developed two powerful social networking tools it plans to roll out to staff over the com-ing months as it upgrades its infra-structure from Sharepoint 2007 to Sharepoint 2010.

The first will offer each employee of BT a Facebook-like profile page. It promises to make it easier for BT staff to find the right experts within the company for the projects they are working on. They will be able to see at a glance what projects, and even what documents, other members of staff are working on.

“It brings some of the social net-working elements into our business. People can expose much more infor-mation in real time. It is going to allow people to get plugged into

other people and discover what other things are going on, and where the people are with the skills and experi-ence that would help them,” he says.

Collaboration and re-use The second tool, known as Deal-point, will help BT staff to manage bids for contracts. BT plans to use the tool to bring together in one electronic meeting place information about projects that was previously dispersed throughout the company in e-mails and spreadsheets on multiple PCs.

Designers, project managers and finance specialists will be able to collaborate as the bid progresses, and gain access to all the documentation.

Dealpoint provides the project teams with dashboards which will give them a clear view of which projects are behind schedule, what parts of the project have been com-pleted and what has yet to be done. And, just as importantly, the tool will allow BT staff to re-use material gathered for one contract bid for use in future bids.

“Historically it has been quite challenging to re-use the investment

CW Buyer’s guidesocial media

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more onlineA PDF version of this case study can be downloaded

from the CW+ whitepaper librarycomputerweekly.com/241412.htm

Video: Collaboration technology streamlines KPN

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In depth: Guide to social networking in the enterprise

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buyer’s guide<<

Towering ambition: BT brings together electronic data from around the world into one place using Dealpoint

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in making one bid on the next bid. Because we are doing this in Share-point, we are going to be able to use the intellectual property we create in going through that process a lot more,” says Scott. “That means when we come to do something else that is similar, rather than put in all the effort and work in to re-doing the bid, we will be able to reuse elements.”

Some 500 BT staff have been using the system to manage contract bids since it went live in November. The early results are encouraging, says Scott. “We have seen a tremen-dous return on that,” he says. “And really that has enabled a group of people from across BT to work much more effectively.”

BT plans to extend its roll-out of Sharepoint from the pilot across the whole company by the end of the year. In addition to the dedicated tools BT has developed, staff will be able to use the system to create their own shared workspaces when they work together on any project.

Business caseScott says he did not feel the need to put together a formal business case for the project. Collaboration tools are now an essential part of BT’s infrastructure, and living without them would be like living without e-mail, he says.

“We would struggle to operate as a business without instant messaging and e-mail. Those things have become utilities that everyone gets. It is part of doing your work, like a phone and a laptop. Collaboration tools are the same,” he says.

Because BT has an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, the costs of the software roll-out are small. BT is minimising hardware costs by hosting Sharepoint on its internal cloud of virtualised servers.

“We have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft, so this does not become a big, expensive project. It is very much more an incremental evolution of our infrastructure,” says Scott. “Historically we had dedicated servers that might have sat there doing nothing all day. Now those servers are sitting on virtualised infrastructure, so we can sit other things on the same servers. The infra-structure investment for this project is very low.”

BT paved the way for the project 18 months ago when it joined Micro-soft’s Technology Adoption Pro-gramme. Microsoft worked with the company to help it understand the capabilities on Sharepoint, provided early copies of the software and worked to help BT exploit its capabilities.

Scott says deploying the techno-logy has been relatively painless. There was only one significant hic-cup, when one version of Sharepoint had difficulties accessing BT’s large staff directory.

“Microsoft recognised that as a problem. And they gave us some workarounds within 24 hours. They used that to work out why the prod-uct was not behaving as they would want it. And they changed the code and came back with another beta release to resolve that,” he says.

Migration from SharepointBT has begun rolling out the Share-point 2010 platform. The system will run in parallel with Sharepoint 2007, which will be shut down by the end

of the year. People will be able to mi-grate material from the old system to the new one if they need to.

“I think we will probably have 40,000 or 50,000 people using Share-point. It could be even more than that for the BT profile. We could be talk-ing about 60,000 or 70,000 people,” says Scott.

Scott predicts he will have no diffi-culty in persuading BT staff to mi-grate to the new version of Share-point. “You only have to do a short demo of Sharepoint 2010 and people really start to bite your arm off for it,” he says. “You sit in a room with peo-ple and you show it to them. After a little while you almost see people’s lights go on –‘I could do that.’ People get very excited about it.” ■