Why organizations benefit from social business - and why some of them fear it

Leaving internal e-mailing behind, and exchanging it with a social collaboration initiatives, leads to a greater good for the whole organization - but also to an inevitable change in your company culture. Most organizations benefit greatly, but many also fear the tranformation. Two new studies explain why.

Just as the business world adapted to online commerce, also known as ebusiness, in the beginning of the new millennium - it will adapt to the growing need of creating a smarter and more productive workforce through social collaboration. A workforce that today drowns in an overflow of e-mail, memos and waste information.

If a company knew what it really knows (as HP once put it) - it would be threefold more productive.


IBM: "Important information lacks a natural and central repository"

A white paper from IBM, Patterns in Achieving Social Business Success By Leading and Pioneering Organizations, claims that knowledge is the key economic resource and the dominant - and perhaps even the only - source of competitive advantage. In order for that to happen, you need to do two things: 1) You need to decentralize authorship, and 2) you need to unleash every co-worker's knowledge.

One key reason for utilizing social collaboration across the whole company line is the fact that all important information, that today gets passed along through private conversations or informal meetings, lacks a natural and central repository.

You cannot Google your own company - but what if you could? Employees wouldn't have to waste time inventing the wheel over and over, or spend hours every month looking for knowledge they think is there somewhere - but not exactly where.

Another significant value for most organizations is that social collaboration rapidly enhances success in the sales department. Marketing and sales efforts of today target individuals, and no longer the masses. This means that information to a larger degree has to be both relevant and timely. IBM found out that social features and mobile access to customer relationship management applications increased the productivity of sales people by more than 25 percent, which is huge.

Microsoft: "Employees believe in social collaboration tools - but companies fear them"

Also, Microsoft released a study right before summer that stated that 50 percent of employees believe social collaboration tools make them more productive while more than 30 percent of companies restrict the use or undervalue them.

The reason behind this discrepancy is fear to let go, and the perceived need of a secure hand of command and control management. Executives want predictability, and there is a notion that social collaborations lacks just that - predictability.

In today's fast-paced world, innovation and agility - two important key factors that rely heavily on unpredictability - are the precise two things that make organizations more adaptive to market changes and competitive threats.

Once again, the solution is not to fear - but to broaden the content in the search engine of your company, and decentralize authorship and unleash each co-worker's knowledge. The solution is not to command your workforce to communicate, but to offer them tools to choose from - be it a blog, wiki, or something else.

Security concerns - a valid reason for restriction of social collaboration tools?

Only the Microsoft study talks about security - but not specifically in regards to the Prism-scandal (these studies were conducted before that went public). The study claims that 68 percent of respondents view security concerns as an important reason for restrictions of social collaboration. There is a significant difference between younger and older (51 percent of people 18-24, and 75 percent of people 45+), but a majority views security as a reason for restrictions nevertheless.

At Incentive, we believe that the reason for fear of security concerns is due to the fact that the organization in many cases have no direct control over the business critical data that resides within a central repository, such as the social collaboration tool. Software tools like Yammer or Jive are typical examples of software-as-a-service; the user logs into a server that sits in the lap of the software provider - and not on a server that resides behind the organization's own firewall.

Incentive is typically installed on your own server; not on ours. You can use Incentive from a cloud service, but you don't have to. We don't really care for owning, managing or controlling your data - in fact; we want nothing to do with it. It's your's.

What we DO like to offer - is the possibility of building your own Internet - an Internet that will let you google your own company. An Internet that is as secure as you want it to be - not as secure as we want it to be.

And we believe that both studies, from IBM and Microsoft, show us that we're pretty much in the right track here.

Jimmy Wilhelmsson
Head of Communications, Incentive

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