In trying to understand the level of collaboration maturity in an organization, I have been looking into specific indicators such as how many people are involved, and how representative that is of the organization. For any new business tool or technology, gaining a core of early adopters is both exciting and dangerous--if it only stays within an echo-chamber of early adopters. To become a business priority, it needs to grow beyond this group, become commonplace and create value for the organization. The question in the title may sound like a self-contradictory, but I have good reason to ask.
In a whitepaper last year, my peer and co-author on this paper, Jeanne Murray, and I emphasized a notion that some organizations may not be entirely clear on: you need to develop a socially networked enterprise, and not just a rank of socially networked individuals. I can’t do better than to quote that section from the paper:
To illustrate the difference…, consider the experience of two sales executives:
- Ana uses social collaboration capabilities to connect with colleagues, manage her workload, and collaborate on presentations with customers and colleagues. She increases her own productivity and that of her team, achieving greater efficiencies and driving faster execution. She’s operating very effectively as an individual in the network, leveraging collaboration capabilities to her advantage, and gaining business value.
- Randy does the same, and more. Because his company is a socially networked enterprise, he is able to leverage the participation of distant and likely unknown colleagues across the globe. He uses a social network analysis tool to find expertise in the network, make connections, and get help. For example, a client asks for a technical briefing on an area outside his expertise, Virtual Worlds. Randy uses the network to identify a list of experts by topic, to assess his own relationships to those people (i.e., his “six degrees of separation”), and to get introductions via his contacts to key leaders who could help his clients. Within days, the Global Director of Virtual Business is on a plane to meet with two clients. “Sandra was willing to adjust her schedule to meet these clients,” he says. “That level of trust couldn’t have happened if our mutual colleague Wayne hadn’t introduced us, and I wouldn’t have known about the connection without the social network.”
While Ana certainly has differentiating skills that increase her value as an employee, Randy can accomplish far more because so many of his colleagues are participating in the network. Enterprise 2.0 participation reveals relationships (Randy-to-Wayne and Wayne-to-Sandra) and facilitates connections among people. The organization benefits from the improvements in individual productivity, but it gains even more from the rich network of relationships across the enterprise.
Early adopters are such socially networked individuals. Even as a group, they may not come from enough aspects, roles, or departments across your organization to create that atmosphere of a truly representative collaborative enterprise. An echo chamber simply amplifies the needs of a certain group; it may be loud and fervent but does not represent the views of everyone. They may include a number of thought-leaders and executive advocates among them, but you still have to consider them with a grain of salt. Table 1 is a dissection of behaviors I’ve observed over the years.
Table 1: Some differences between Early Adopter groups and a Socially Networked Enterprise
| Early adopter group | A Socially Networked Enterprise | |
| Venues for social interaction | Few, or concentrated within a few areas | Possibly many distributed venues for different reasons |
| Activity | A lot of activity and content within a few places | the average person interacts more frequently overall, but it is distributed across more places |
| Excitement level | High excitement, but localized within some venues | Varies and can seem low, or loosely distributed |
| Why | It’s the new thing! | It’s what I do to get my work done |
| Innovation level | Using this environment displays me as an innovator | Using the social enterprise platform in itself doesn’t make me innovative, but it is what I can produce with others over it. |
| How far do I need to be from the ‘real action’? | One or two degrees away from the specific people involved | Doesn’t matter. |
| Types of relationships | Emphasis on Bonding: “One of Us” | Emphasis on Bridging: “Across the org” |
| Delivers value when… | You know the people involved | You can ask just about anyone |
| Overhead of relationships | Need to get to know a number of people well: high overhead on maintaining relationships on a regular (daily, weekly, or monthly) basis | Need to know lots of people but don’t need to maintain relationships that regularly with many |
| Consensus forming | Easy for common interests; possibly falls into groupthink | May be hard to do, even with sufficient consensus and communication tools |
I can just hear it now: “Rawn, you’ve just taken the fun out of it. You make a socially networked enterprise sound like routine and dull work.” That is an important point: work still needs to be enjoyable for people to stay engaged. But, once you grow beyond an initial group, any concept or technology becomes so common that it looses it high-shine luster. What is important is to distinguish common from productive.
Cellphones are ubiquitous and ordinary (the average cellphone) but years ago, simply having a cellphone sparked awe and an aura of exclusivity. Phone conversations over these devices are as productive as they were in the beginning. If anything, they are even more productive today in the work environment because it is much easier to get a hold of other people. The commonality of access through cellphones created a new level of productivity. Try, if you can, to imagine the frustration of not having phone access—when you actually want it—while you’re out of the office, sitting at an airport, or even wandering around lost. Social collaboration platforms are very much the same. They increase in value when it becomes integrated into the work of the masses of your organization.
How do you know if your enterprise social platform has grown beyond just the early adopter stage? If you have the capability, you can look at the data through a social analytics lens focused on the demographics. That really is the best way even beyond surveys. Many people forget when they have interacted or the frequency thereof, but the data typically leaves a trail. Once you have addressed the privacy issues appropriately, looking at the aggregate data of many users by different segments can tell you a good deal about the diversity of your adoption. These segments are up to you; you can organize them by job role, department, geo-location, or product or service area. There are many other issues of understanding the data of how people interact, but that is beyond the point of this post.
What you really want to know is diversity, and inter-dependency—how well-connected people are across the different segments. Inter-dependency here is just another way of describing the average number of network connections—or ‘friending’ if you prefer—between people in different job roles. You need a basic understanding of level of dependencies and where they lie before you can get into the deeper question of how these dependencies reflect your organizational needs, processes, and strategy. To understand such inter-dependency you will need social network analysis tools and people with the skills to perform such analyses.
Why? Because most organizations know that work happens where it needs to, and despite all attempts to funnel it in specific ways, people will always discover alternatives—and they should, to encourage innovation into work processes. Social network analysis may not and need not be a perfect mapping to show value. Even simple explorations can help identify basic issues such as bottlenecks and isolated groups.
As you can see, examining the issue of if an organization has matured beyond just a test or early adopter group was quite helpful to me to understand diversity and the necessary elements to examine this. There’s much more to social business maturity beyond adoption.
[Note: To bring awareness to this, Jeanne and I have submitted a proposal for a session on the topic of “Maturing beyond an Enterprise 2.0 Pilot Projects” to the Enterprise 2.0 Conference this coming June in Boston. I also have another proposal “Match Your Measurement Methodology to Your Situation”, while Jeanne has another proposal “Going Global, by keeping it Local.” As I’ve said before, this conference is the pivotal event each year on this topic, so I hope you see you there inquiring about this new advent in the way we do connected business. ]
