Putting Business First – Enterprise 2.0 efficiency and the term “social”

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Recently, I have observed that new Enterprise 2.0-terms that contain the word “social” are created almost monthly (see e.g. “Social Business” by IBM, [Kulz11]). Therefore, I have decided to publish my first thoughts on the use of such “social terms” in business environments. Speaking as an experienced consultant, the term “social” is generally associated with more unpleasant and productivity reducing connotations. Even though I’m not a classic “Top-Down-Thinker”, I daily deal with the middle and top management of companies and I am quite familiar with the association CEO’s have if you want to present or introduce “SOCIAL media”, “SOCIAL business” or “SOCIAL computing”. As you can imagine, they will not be happy about pretended “SOCIAL activities” in their companies. And – as you can imagine as well, “the business” quite often struggles to see how so called “SOCIAL activities” can leverage efficiency and therefore generally aim at limiting “SOCIAL activities” to the extent necessary.

Putting business first – Nothing else matters.

Persuading “the business” about social activities is like a Sisyphus-task. Or to put it more candidly, using the term social in a business environment is from my perspective not the best way to persuade people of promising investments – Although I have to admit that some of the creators of the “social terms” are substantially correct. As described in my book (see [Domb11, p. 20 et seq.]), I’m not the only person, who thinks in this way:

“When some managers hear talk of social technologies, they immediately think of technologies, that facilitate activities like happy hour, fantasy sports league drafts, and office gossip. They hear ‘social,’ in short, and think it means not work-related, or time-wasting, or productivity-draining.” [McAf09, p. 15 et seq.]

Like Andrew McAfee, I prefer the term “collaborative” or other terms like “Enterprise 2.0″ and “Enterprise collaboration”. Terms like these are easier to understand from a management and/or business point of view particularly when you are talking about new collaborative technologies that provide cost savings and efficiency advantages in a competitive market… Although Enterprise 2.0 (“Enterprise collaboration” respectively) is about “transparency” and “involving” the product- and process-knowledge of staff, it does not mean, that “SOCIAL activities” will totally override the authority and responsibility of the management. Rather you need to activate the passion for interaction of your employees to optimize enterprise collaboration.

“If you can get people to help you even though it is not their job description, you are going to get scale that you can never achieve with traditional budgets.” [Francois Gossieaux, see Tucc10]

Even though this citation (from Francois Gossieaux) is from an article about “SOCIAL passion” in enterprise collaboration (see [Tucc10]), I like the message about “passion” (although I do not follow the term “social”, as outlined above). First you need the aforenamed passion for enterprise collaboration to put business first and gain scale effects – the term social is not the crucial aspect, it is only a less perfect “label”… With the passion of your staff, Enterprise 2.0 can get a well-coordinated and effective factor to promote competitiveness through solving problems in a collaborative manner, optimizing transparency of enterprise processes and providing enterprise knowledge.

Well – make careful use of the term “social” in business environments – do not irritate, just persuade  your clients of the value added through these new opportunities.

Any thoughts? Please do not hesitate to send me an email – or simply use the comment function…

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