Adoption of social tools for collaboration requires sharing

"Sharing" by ryancr, on Flickr

I have been busy the past three to four months shifting my base and settling in the suburb of Bangalore (technically a different state altogether) and this has taken a toll on my work as well as my social media engagement. Nevertheless, I am slowly getting back on track with quite a truck load of stuff to be done and trust to be regained at the workplace. The task of highest & immediate priority is helping in resubmitting a year 2015 plan for our group, incorporating the 1st round of review comments. And one of the key components is - justifying the further investments into 'social' by providing, among other things, estimated market size.


Which means I have to provide numbers from expert predictions, which is typically a Gartner, Forrester, IDC, etc. although it’s been well documented that expert predictions are quite poor. ;) In the Social CRM space even Gartner has had to revise its predictions for the size of the market (their Magic Quadrants for the same have been criticized too). I am yet to take a dive into market size for social tools in the internal collaboration arena (Enterprise 2.0), which is actually a bit more mature market than the Social CRM one.

All in all, sales forecasting closely follows market adoption of the new technology and the speed of adoption is said to be an S-curve. And since we are in the cusp of two such S curves, one finishing (systems design view) and one beginning (social computing view), it is not possible to predict the future. However, as per research literature, the speed of adoption of a new product has been shown to be a function of several factors including:

• The product's relative advantage over existing products 
• The degree to which the new product is compatible with existing operations and attitudes 
• The degree to which the new product is simple (rather than complex) 
• The degree to which the new product can be tried on a limited basis 
• The degree to which the product is observable.

Hold your thoughts on this one.

Coincidentally PwC has just come out with a new report called "Transforming collaboration with social tools" (you can read a review along with excerpts by Sameer Patel) where they have this great picture:

It puts a few stuff in perspective for me. But what helped me more is a reminder from Graham Hill in the back channel that "just banging on collaboration technology will NOT result in an uncollabrative organisation becoming one iota more collaborative than before. Just more expensive. People make organisations collaborative not technology." While I wholeheartedly agree to his old saw that "Old Organization + New Technology = Expensive Old Organization" or "OO+NT=EOO", I have a bit of optimism for social computing that hasn't diminished over the years. Social Computing for the first time has the potential to break out of the mould because they are a kind of self feeding engine when it comes to adoption.

The way to avert the OO+NT=EOO scenario is to actually look at the way the organization needs to be changed, roll them out and ensure adoption happens. And the technology is to be used to support these organizational changes.

Now coming to social tools, they have various advantages over traditional enterprise software tools which I am not detailing out but just pointing out a few (am assuming that the social tools have been deployed in context of work, not as stand alone 'corporate facebooks'):

• help in exception handling & sense making by allowing users to do ad-hoc work, especially when used in conjunction with the tools that support predictable execution like ERP or CRM (refer picture above from PwC report)
• help in building social capital via both network closure (social capital is created by a network of strongly interconnected elements) as well as structural holes (social capital is created by a network in which people can broker connections between otherwise disconnected segments) arguments
• in large organizations, help in expert discovery not just because of rich user profiles in the 'corporate facebooks', but also because openly sharing on these systems of engagement allows new random connections to form between the clusters inside the organization and thus reducing the number of hops required to reach a particular person within the organization with whom we are not connected or are even aware of (am assuming organization head count is large enough & geographically distributed enough to behave approximately like a scale free network)
• help in content filtering via algorithms as well as by the community (too much of communication is an issue otherwise when social tools are deployed)

Point 1 in the speed of adoption is covered. And yet, the tools themselves lend to certain people changes if a few assumptions are met. This is where organizational changes might definitely be required, and if an organization has not been open within itself it definitely needs very senior management adoption as well as encouragement for the enthusiastic early adopters (champions). Our CEO stopped sending out emails to the organization to encourage blogs usage; now there are employees who have read only his blog posts, but as such the number of people posting/commenting/reading blogs is very high too.

By the same token, social tools do not require the organization to change much. It is compatible with existing operations & attitudes. People are hardwired in their brains to collaborate. That is how we evolved, it is the corporate culture that makes us hide stuff. 

"... we're reluctant to share private information, so we aggregate information poorly. In one study the researchers gave team members shared information about the same three candidates, but also gave each member a unique piece of information about one candidate. If the team members shared all the unique information, they would choose the best-qualified candidate. If they used only the information common to all of them, they would pick the wrong candidate. A vast majority of the time, they selected a suboptimum candidate. Why? Because they chose to talk about the shared information and to reserve the unique information. Committees are not optimized to share private information. So even in organizations where the information exists, it's not being surfaced."

Unfortunately what people forget is that we did not go the way of our cousins the neanderthals especially because we shared with others, not just family members (and language was our first social tool that enabled it).

Additionally, social tools have the capability to blend with all the tools supporting the formal (predictable) processes as well as the hitherto not much supported (by IT) aspect: work-culture (behaviours & attitudes). This covers point 2 in the speed of adoption factors.

Social tools for the enterprise are simple & easy from the word go because they have been heavily inspired by the familiar consumer products outside of the organization (you know, facebook, twitter, blogs, wikis, etc.). Covers point 3 by default.

Social tools are increasingly available on the cloud in pay as you go models or for free/freemium. Hence it is possible for people to try it out on a limited basis. Covers point 4.

Social tools, if made available to everybody, features like the notifications, news/activity streams, et al. make it easier to observe what others are doing in the system & how ... not the case in your traditional enterprise software ... and thus the product & product usage is observable. This covers point 5 of the factors for speed of adoption. This aspect helps with social learning too, thus leading to more stickier adoption if not faster.

Also, social tools lend themselves to all three forms of viral adoption of any behavioral change - 

1. contagion: users adopt when they come in touch with someone who has adopted
2. social influence: users adopt when they see many people have adopted
3. social learning: users adopt when they see how others are using and benefiting 

So, to cut a long story short - sharing is essential to success of social tools for collaboration in an enterprise.