PERF RMANCE 04 - The Performance Portal - Ernst & Young

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Figure 2. Community “critical success factors” Explicit, agreed-upon expectations for measurement and metrics Supporting technology that meets community needs Connecting people Strong, visible sponsorship and governance Community Rewards and recognition Relevant content A clear business case, community charter and goals/objectives Engaged members with defined roles and responsibilities Clear expectations for activities and deliverables Successful enterprise communities must be explicitly sponsored, appropriately resourced and actively managed to develop and maintain momentum over time. Although they may look quite different from the outside, successful communities often have many things in common, including: 1. Strong, visible sponsorship and governance 2. A clear business case, community charter and goals/objectives 3. Engaged members with defined roles and responsibilities 4. Clear expectations for activities and deliverables 5. Mechanisms and support for developing trusted relationships 6. Knowledge generation, capture and transfer processes Incentives, recognition and rewards that match the culture Knowledge generation, capture and transfer processes Mechanisms and support for developing trusted relationships 7. Incentives, recognition and rewards that match the culture 8. Supporting technology that meets community needs 9. Explicit, agreed-upon expectations for measurement and metrics Figure 3. (A) Disconnected groups (B) Boundary-spanning behaviors Not every successful enterprise community will have every single one of these; however, these nine elements form a good checklist for those looking to begin a community, or to find ways to add value to existing communities.
Connection as competitive advantage The risks of the social software-enabled enterprise However exciting the convergence of social and technological trends might be, there are risks for both sides. Any community initiative not positioned correctly and championed by both formal and informal leaders will be slow to achieve a return on investment. Social initiatives must be explicitly supported by the hierarchy of leaders, from the executive to the line management level. Just because it’s “social technology” doesn’t mean people will use it — the usual enterprise change management rules apply, and leadership support is often a crucial constraint at the best of times. The definition and modeling of desired behaviors is another essential element. One informal law often cited is that the collaboration technology used in an organization will default to the lowest level of comfort of the most powerful person in the collaboration — a correlation also reflected in Burt’s research on social structures and seniority (Burt, 1997). Therefore, engaging credible leaders in a visible manner in the initiative, and equipping them to succeed, is one key step on the path to success. Non-verbal and behavioral cues have always impacted human behaviors, and perhaps even more so in a connected organization. Resources need to be made available to encourage risk taking, boundary spanning (see Figure 3) and the courage to innovate. Success stories need to be harvested and told far and wide, using all available channels, by leadership at multiple levels in the organization. The new capability from the social web comes with a new set of user expectations. If the community tool you launch internally falls short of these user expectations, then user adoption will be low. This means you will have failed before you even started, as low user rates means no network and therefore no value to the organization. Business and IT leaders need to have frank discussions about how to balance the needs of the user base to connect and collaborate with the needs of the organization. This will help to control costs and keep technology portfolios in order. Because the technologies involved can be sourced from the internet with low startup costs, many social-forward managers are already piloting social business software applications for various purposes. The effect of this is a “traffic jam” of disaggregated applications with no overall strategy or link to your organization’s enterprise architecture. If your goal is an eventual enterprise-wide platform, tread carefully, as each of these pilots is an emergent community that must be carefully and skillfully brought within the fold. Do it wrongly and you risk creating a hundred social brushfires from a wellnetworked group of dissident employees. To forestall this, focus on their needs early and often, and integrate their requirements wherever possible. The technologies used both inside and outside the organizational firewall play a key role in connecting people, but serious challenges associated with adoption and productive use of such tools is common. In fact, the very userfriendliness of social tools produces one of the greatest risks of this new toolset. Without clear guidelines and governance, technology-enabled communities have the potential to create “shadow repositories“ of authoritative documents that may be critical to organizational success. Content management challenges, such as document version control and adherence to intellectual property rules, are emerging as significant sources of risk to a firm’s information architecture from improperly governed activities on social business software platforms. Technology must be compatible with employee workflow in a very pragmatic way. Changes to well-entrenched enterprise-wide process workflows are not easily adopted. Training programs, even on highly usable technologies, can play a key role in change management efforts and the achievement of organizational goals. SharePoint 2007 has been deployed by many clients for years as an enterprise collaboration platform. However, basic challenges of adoption and proper use still remain at the individual and departmental level, leading to a landscape of duplicate, redundant and abandoned Sharepoint sites — most of which could have been avoided given more targeted investments in embedding proper processes into employee workflows around the Sharepoint platform. In sum, these technologies stand poised to deliver significant value to large organizations — but offer significant risks as well. A methodical current state analysis can pay dividends in identifying current organizational, cultural and governanceoriented gaps, as well as illuminating any social projects flying under the radar for the purposes of evaluation and engagement. Gaining this understanding and engagement are crucial first steps on the road to the social enterprise. 43
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