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White Paper

Approaches to Help Ignite Adoption of Social
Collaboration

Executive Summary

Technology tools and trends often start in the consumer space and eventually work their way into the enterprise.

This effect, known as the consumerization of IT (Source:

http://www.infoworld.com/t/consumerization-of-

it/consumerization-of-it-190132

), is helping to lead the rise of social tools in the workspace. With the usage

explosion of consumer social tools like Facebook and Twitter, email has become a secondary means of

communication and collaboration for many in the consumer world. This trend is leading enterprises to evaluate

ways that they too can harness the power of social media tools.

This rise of social collaboration in the enterprise is powered by social software. Gartner states that objective of

social software is to “encourage, capture, and organize open and free-form interaction between employees,

customers, and partners,” and that it helps create and exploit “collective knowledge.”

(Source:

http://www.gartner.com/technology/it-glossary/#18_3

Many believe that this shift towards social collaboration represents the next major wave of enterprise

collaboration - with its predecessors being the telephone and email. And while it may seem foreign that there was

a time when people were resistant to using email or even the telephone, those times did exist. To think that there

were companies that once tried to determine return on investment for using email is almost incomprehensible. It is

obvious now how those methods of collaboration can help. But social collaboration is newer and people are still

trying to understand it. Until there exists the same level of acceptance and understanding with social collaboration,

there will be a need to shepherd its adoption.

This need for such stewardship is quickly realized by most anyone who has been involved in an initiative to roll out

social software across an enterprise. They can testify that it is challenging to persuade employees to adopt this

emerging way of sharing information and collaborating with co-workers. This can be discouraging because

adoption of other types of systems, especially task-oriented systems (e.g., finance systems or human resources

systems) and document-oriented applications (e.g., productivity tools) seem to be much more straightforward.

Those types of systems are typically very clear in how they should be used, why they should be used, and by

whom, in part because they have been part of the work culture for so long. So it is easy for workers to incorporate

these tools within their everyday work experience.

However, people-oriented systems (e.g., communities, enterprise social networking) that rely on enterprise social

software can be more challenging because they are very new to the work culture.

This challenge raises a couple of questions: How can a company build that initial momentum? Where does the

enterprise begin? Business value (as well as personal value to employees) increases as more of their colleagues

participate within the environment, so finding an answer to these issues is vital to the success of the social

collaboration initiative. This is referred to as the “network effect,” which explains how a product can become more

valuable as more people use it. (Source:

http://articles.businessinsider.com/2012-03-

05/research/31123118_1_ios-android-platform