Hills to Climb and Mountains to Move...

It shouldn't come as any strong surprise that most nascent technologies find their way into the enterprise through the halls of IT.

Long  before TakeTwo, Electronic Arts and Apple had hit their stride back in the dotcom mania days (yes, this was the late 90's!) with their market-making plays -- I can recall the engineering halls of my dotcom startup buzzing with Ultima Online, Everquest and Napster (and, I mean, Shawn Fanning's original version).

And so has this also been true for the deployment of most Enterprise 2.0 technologies, including Social Software, as Chris Fletcher (AMR) recently noted in his research brief "Enterprise 2.0: Findings for the CTO".

Historically, there are three challenges that most firms must get past in achieving greater deployments and adoption of their enterprise software initiatives:

• a failure to justify the investment spend required to achieve the intended benefits for the line-of-business department
• a lack of overall "fit" for a solution's functionality to be relevant and truly make the lives easier for it's intended users
• an inordinate amount of time required to physically install the software, test it for stability and train the department on how to use it

Chris affirms these hallmark hills that all organizations must climb in this same brief.

As does Forrester's Erica Driver in her report "Information Workplace Trends 2007".

Social software initiatives that fall in the realm of Enterprise 2.0, on the other hand, require a fraction of the deployment cost of their older, enterprise application siblings -- and are often achieved in record time.

A case in point is Dow Chemical's 2007 implementation of a social software solution, as covered by Gartner analyst Thomas Otter and fellow bloggeryte Dennis McDonald.

The business challenge Dow faces is significant, to say the least, with 40% of its global workforce coming up for retirement over the next 5 years.  (Read that again and let it sink in...that's a huge # for "any" organization!)  And, Dow intends to use social software to build bridges in its "no-holds barred" offensive to recruit and retain talent.  The fact-sheet to the success Dow has achieved is equally impressive:

• one year for the entire project from conception thru deployment to end-user adoption (i.e., birth of the idea on the client side, before any vendor presentations thru QA and go-live)
• 90-days for physical implementation of the software solution
• over 4,500 users of the system 90-days after launch...!
• 95% repeat usage of the system by all end-users
• achievement of all adoption KPIs within 60 days vs. Dow's target of one-year

With performance proof-points like these -- and others documented by the white-label firms -- the mountain social software must move to gain a foothold in the enterprise landscape may not be so large afterall.

As Forrester's Erica Driver notes -- the market timing is "now" for firms and vendors alike to get into the social software game and experiment with individual pilots.

So, what guideposts should firms use to stay on a smart path of social software exploration?

• Don't "implement" a social software solution for the sake of having a social software pilot in your enterprise because it's "de riguer"...instead, make sure you have a specific business purpose behind it.  In other words, as William Jonathan Drayton use to say..."Don't Believe The Hype".

• Where and whenever possible -- try to force yourself to get past the "Facebook" mentality of so many social-networking solutions today and directly embed your social software solution within existing workspaces already used and trafficked by your employees.  The axim "it's all about me" must guide your implementations of enteprise social software.

"Communal collaboration hubs" ala Facebook will certainly offer a measure of value -- especially if they have a theme.  But social-networking solutions that are embedded directly within an individual application or a specific content section of corporate portal -- which are also designed to purposefully (and only) support that experience -- will have far greater value and more significant adoption.

You should have hundreds of these types of implementations "everywhere"...versus a single version of "Facebook for company XYZ".  If you want an example of social-networking capabilities embedded directly into an application and "done right"...take a look at Xobni.

• And, finally, take real advantage of what you have once you've finally launched your solution and perform some measure of social network analysis -- manually or automated...just do it!  Like any well-managed stock portfolio, your "social enterprise network" will truly become an asset only if it's assessed, tweaked, managed and understood.

There is real "secret sauce" brewing behind all of the connections and activity in your network that form the profundity of most organizational problems (e.g., why do teams fail to gel?  why do employees fail to perform?  why do employees leave?) waiting to be captured.

It's rare that we have such a convergence of organizational need, market hype, vendor investment and user-willingness (if not outright demand) for a specific software solution.

So, let's get it started...