I’ve just been to the Unicom conference in London on Social Tools for Business Use, and found it really insightful to hear people’s views and experiences on where and how social tools are actually being adopted within organisations. Seems like we’re seeing more and more case studies being shared (here we heard from BT, CILIP and IBM amongst others). As the word is spread about the benefits of so called Enterprise 2.0 tools, hopefully the light bulb will go ‘ping’ in more people’s heads, and we’ll see more organisations taking the plunge - hurrah! Here are some bits and pieces that I found most interesting:

Social tools are cropping up all over the work place

• In a world of information overload, social networks are crucial in helping people to filter that data. Think about it, in real life you’re far more likely to make a decision on renting a new movie based on a recommendation from a friend, and this applies equally in the work place. Employees will place far greater value on a resource that has been recommended by a colleague or respected expert within the organisation that a resource that has been found by carrying out a search on Google or by trawling through the corporate intranet directory structure.

• Social tools are really starting to infiltrate organisations from the bottom up, as employees who are familiar using social tools in their personal life see the huge benefit of translating them into the workplace. We’re going to see more of this as the new generation of employees graduate from university and expect (nay demand!) to see social tools being used.

• Vertical sectors and departments that are genuinely starting to embrace social tools tend to be the knowledge economies, no real surprise there:

1. Legal
2. Consultancies
3. Retail banking
4. Asset management
5. Pharmaceuticals
6. Education
7. Research & Development
8. Communications

Ready, steady, test!

In terms of implementation, most people I talked to said that the value of social tools can be proved easily and quickly by implementing lightweight pilots, allowing employees to experience tools in context and subsequently understand the benefits. For some organisations, it can be challenging to run Software As A Service, because of IT security policies, but in reality, you can’t use technology to legislate against information leaks; employees quit to work for competitors, people leave important documents on the train, documents can be emailed to personal email accounts etc etc. Rather, if employees are treated like adults they will behave like adults.

Getting your project off the ground…
These themes just kept on coming up, no matter what social tool businesses had implemented:

• Your project needs a sponsor, and a facilitator – you can’t expect the community to just get on with it by themselves
• You must clearly communicate the purpose and mission so that employees have a shared understanding of how they can use the tool
• Pre-populate tools where appropriate so that when people start using them they don’t just see a blank piece of paper; show them examples of how the tool can be used
• Employees will need to be supported in the adoption of tools and the change in the way of working. At the start, this may include one-on-one demonstrations to walk them through.
• Create quick guides / glossaries to help employees understand the tool and how to get the best out of it
• Use administration facilities to track who’s using tools and help you understand who might need more support going forward
• People need to be encouraged to share information, if they’ve not been used to doing that in the past, then you’re going to have to shift the cultural behaviour (which will need management support and some change management skills – don’t underestimate this!)

Can you prove the value?

A critical point that many peopole talked about was the importance of having a clear sense of purpose and mission in implementing social tools, and then measuring success against that. What you measure of course depends on your objectives; before rolling out social tools you need to understand the problem you’re trying to solve and how the tool will help you achieve that. The days of just implementing these new tools to see what happens are probably over.

With social bookmarking for example, if you’re a pharmaceutical company your trial objectives may be

1. to help the R&D team more effectively share information
2. to enable members of the global R&D team to more easily find colleagues with relevant expertise
3. to allow management to understand how the R&D interact with each other

It’s pretty hard to try and calculate hard ROI numbers around these kind of objectives, but not that difficult to evaluate whether your project has been a ‘success’ by surveying employees and management against the Critical Success Factors you’ve identified (hopefully you established these CSFs before you started the project!)

So all in all, an interesting event and great to talk to people in the field who are really giving social tools a go in the business environment. Be very interested to hear about anyone else’s experiences, particularly around social bookmarking.