Businesses are losing a golden opportunity to evolve and the recession is not to blame. Instead it is short-sightedness and a lack of confidence on the part of businesses that should bear the burden. Kaushik Banerjee, Vice President at Aditi Technologies, lists the top three culprits.
1. Myopia about the social layer
It is sad that while companies and IT teams debate about opening internal access to networks such as Facebook and Skype in order to build employee social networks, this thought process is rarely extended to include the concept of developing networks orientated for customers, or around a product or service. The difference is that the later networks have a direct impact to the top line and CSAT, while employee social networks rarely transcend HR metrics and productivity.
Part of this problem is cultural. While there are currently frequent conversations and debates over the business sense of creating employee networks, this is largely as a result of the mainstream status that personal social networks have now achieved. As this is not yet the case for other such networks, these are currently losing out as there is a significant lack of leadership in extending existing networks beyond what is currently available. Most senior executives simply fail to grasp the full potential and think of social in a business context that involves customer and user networks. Innovators like Zappos, Johnson and Johnson and boutique fashion brands are leading the charge on this and opening up the gap with their competition.
2. The Big Brother attitude to the application layer
The biggest failure of social business is the lack of social integrations in daily workflows. Apart from SalesForce and in some cases Microsoft, enterprise software platforms are notoriously conservative about opening up core processes to social networks and uncomfortable about losing control. While the big platforms such as Oracle and SAP have high switching costs and can decide to play against the tide in the near term, the future of application platform is seamless social modules, seamless social integration and open configurable networks. Tools such as Infor, xRM are already pushing CIOs to break open the application layer and embrace social connections in processes that are at the heart of an enterprise.
3. All or nothing misconception
Embracing social is often misconstrued as a radical business change. It need not be. As with any cultural or system change, it should be a gradual and planned transformation. Companies shy away from taking the first step as the scope of the change is often deemed radical and unmanageable. This attitude is the biggest roadblock. Once there is intent within an organisation to implement such a network, for it to be successfully adopted, the journey needs detailed planning with achievable steps mapped out. An example of a logical and natural progression between network platforms would be to begin with an intranet, before moving to Skype, then an integration of Microsoft Lync or SalesForce Chatter before developing to manage projects on Facebook and hosting board meetings using Telepresence software. Having a sense of destination, a decent planning stage of 12-18 months and breaking the journey into modular projects is a rare but effective strategy.
By Kaushik Banerjee
Vice President
Aditi Technologies
http://www.aditi.com/
