Articles
Many of us have social media accounts such as Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter which we use to share experiences and maintain relationships with friends, family and colleagues. While social media is fast becoming part of the everyday fabric of our personal lives, it remains relatively untouched in the workplace – but that’s starting to change.
Social business technologies are a new breed of collaboration tools that control how people interact and communicate at work. Corporate social networks, for example, allow users to create professional profiles, post status updates or blogs and follow colleagues. And social collaboration tools allow teams and groups to share information and discuss ideas and issues through secure online forums.
The goal of social business is to make it easier to find experts and communicate with colleagues in working towards collective objectives. By pooling the knowledge of the right people at the right time, highly efficient teams are better placed to collaborate on new ideas, develop plans and rapidly solve problems than those who rely on ploughing through emails to garner information. For any sceptics, the McKinsey Global Institute estimates that social technologies have the potential to raise the productivity of large organisations by 20-25%.
Engineering is collaborative, with various firms and departments within firms working together on projects. Most communication currently happens over email. This can be frustrating and distracting as in-boxes are flooded with irrelevant, disjointed or outdated message chains. Social collaboration tools can be an excellent remedy for some of these frustrations. Companies such as Alcatel-Lucent, BASF and Cemex are achieving value from social technology through reduced email and information overload; faster and easier access to experts; higher work efficiency; increased productivity and better information sharing.
Elsewhere, “gamification” is harnessing the problem-solving abilities of a wider audience to address challenges. Foldit, for example, was created to fathom a molecular biology puzzle that had flummoxed researchers for 15 years. Once introduced to the public, it was solved within days. For a problem-solving sector such as engineering, this approach has huge potential.
Another example of the value that social collaboration can bring to engineering is when a project hands over from one team to another. Consider the advantage of sharing all historical information and communication with the new team members using a social group workspace. Not only will this allow them to call upon the expert knowledge of their predecessors but they will have insight into the thought processes associated with decisions and can learn from them.
For every success story, however, there are examples of failed social initiatives, with corporate social networks becoming glorified internal newsletters or even redundant. Most failed initiatives have three things in common. First, the social tools are implemented without a clear understanding of the benefits or alignment with business objectives. Second, these tools tend to be separate applications, unrelated to users’ existing processes, so becoming “yet another thing to do”.
Finally, the tools are introduced through a simple invitation email, not through a managed change-control process. As a result, users are reluctant to learn and use a new piece of technology, especially one that doesn’t explicitly answer the “what’s in it for me?” question.
Successful implementations, on the other hand, explicitly specify the benefits that individuals, teams and the entire organisation can achieve.
When managed correctly, social technology can transform how teams operate by extracting the most valuable asset of all – knowledge – and sharing it with the entire organisation. This drives projects forward and increases productivity.