The rapid adoption of social networking by Asian individuals represents both opportunities and challenges for Asian enterprises in the next decade.
Traditional hierarchical and top-down management styles common in the region and the risk-averse, overly analytical decision-making culture present in many large organizations will be severely challenged by the democratization of information that Enterprise 2.0 represents.
Successful Asian enterprises will be those that understand, embrace and exploit the technology, usage and culture inherent in this “democracy”
Enterprise 2.0 (E2.0) is industry shorthand, first coined by Andrew MacAfee from Harvard, for the application of Web 2.0 to the enterprise.
IT is becoming a fundamentally social medium in which the technology itself will be transparent to users. Boosting social interactions, along with changes in the nature of work occasioned by earlier IT investments, holds out the promise of dramatically raising organizational effectiveness. IT organizations must identify their sources of expertise on social interactions — in-house or otherwise — and ensure that those resources are involved in planning and executing a social facilitation strategy for their enterprise
Why does Enterprise 2.0 matter?
At a human resource level the growing ranks of Gen Y employees and managers simply expect that the tools and processes that they have in their personal lives are available in their working lives. Indeed the division between work and play is blurring rapidly in the thinking and behaviour of Gen Y.
In parallel to this expectation is a changing view of what “information” is in the business context. In the old world information for business decision-making comes from corporate information systems supplemented by “experience” and “intuition”
In the new world information comes from a much wider, less controlled and less controllable range of sources including social networking.
So do you behave like King Canute and defy the tide of change or do you manage the reality and exploit it?
Your organization’s approach to this will become a competitive differentiator in the pursuit of talent in the future. You will not be able to hire or retain the people you want to if you do not have an approach to this that is acceptable to younger staff.
The Benefits of Enterprise 2.0
Apart from the fundamental competitive employment aspect there are a number of key business benefits that can be gained through a well-executed strategy:
- Building bonds: Loyalty and tighter, more-productive relationships with communities through high-value interactions.
- New business opportunities: Identifying new business opportunities through greater customer intimacy and by exploring new Web 2.0 delivery models.
- Improve execution effectiveness: Gained through easier communication with suppliers and channels, leading to more-effective collaboration with suppliers and channels. Organizations can create stronger bonds by enhancing social interactions with suppliers and channels.
- Product quality: Product quality is enhanced via better feedback collection mechanisms, including direct customer involvement. As a side effect, brand loyalty can result from customer sense of ownership.
- Employee performance: Employee value through robust information sharing that can reduce information fragmentation, increase responsiveness through rapid expertise rallying, and enhance awareness and broaden employee perspective.
- Creativity: Emergent value through employee innovation can result from an environment where employees can freely contribute their ideas as part of the enterprise community.
The Challenges
These benefits do not emerge accidentally, you need to ensure that your organization has the technology, the processes and the management culture that will allow the effective capture of information, its analysis and the feedback of the information into the relevant business processes so that changes are made.
Some areas require particular focus:
- Delivering Business Value: Major concerns include how to explore social software's enterprise potential, justify an investment, build a strategy and choose a starter initiative. Enterprises should at least be in this investigative stage even if the social software exploration's most likely result is a "wait and see" strategy.
- Overcoming Cultural Barriers: Cultural barriers are a primary impediment to starting and succeeding social software initiatives. There are a host of cultural challenges, often around corporate procedure and policy, openness and transparency, information sharing, strongly authoritarian organizational structures, devaluing social interactions, and a "not invented here" mentality.
- Ensuring Privacy: The issue of handling privacy is critical to a successful social software implementation because, unlike security, there can be a fine line between using profile information appropriately in the context of the social application and crossing the privacy line.
- Governing Participant Behaviors: An enterprise managing a social application is limited in the amount of control it can exert without stifling or outright destroying the community instantiation. This loss of control and the possibility (even if remote) of a community revolt can frighten business and IT leaders.
- Managing Personal and Professional Time: Many organizations are not equipped for operations in virtual workplace and virtual workday scenarios, and are concerned with managing productivity in this more-loosely structured work environment.
Getting Started: What does a good social application look like?
When your organization starts looking at social applications, Gartner has some rules to follow for success:
- Magnetic: The purpose should draw people directly to participate. This is the "What's in it for me?" characteristic. Users should be able easily grasp its importance and the value of participating.
- Aligned: Purpose should align with business value. This is the "What's in it for the business?" characteristic.
- Low-Risk: Choose low risk over high reward. Do not try to change the culture of a community or an organization with social software. No matter how enticing the reward, heed the risk of adoption first.
- Properly Scoped: Start with a minimal scope and focus on growing your community's scale as fast as possible. Once the community has scaled up, users will guide you on how to expand the scope.
- Promotes Evolution: Select purposes that you can build upon. Start by brainstorming numerous possible purposes for a target audience. As you apply these characteristics, weigh which purpose to focus on first. Enable the community to move the purpose forward by promoting emergence.
- Measurable: You can measure the success of a good purpose. Especially early on when organizations are skeptical of social applications, choose purposes where business and community value can be clearly measured.
- Community-Driven: The value must come from the community. The best communities contribute far more to themselves than the enterprises which support them.
Successful adoption of Enterprise 2.0 will be a key characteristic of successful Asian organizations in the next decade. These organizations will attract better talent and exploit information in its fullest sense more effectively than laggards.
By Neil McMurchy, Research Director, IT Marketing & Channels, Gartner
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http://www.gartner.com
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