Benefits of Enterprise Social Networking

Some programs that you gave your all for, just stay in your head for a long time. This program was one that had its ups and downs. They say time will heal all wounds. Or at the very least helps us to not think about them as often. When I was covering for a co-worker (who was out on sabbatical), I was given the task of program managing the implementation of enterprise social networking for the company. I was asked time and time again to present the benefits, as many leaders were struggling with why they needed this. The mother organization struggled daily with the benefits! Coming back and questioning the direction and priority almost monthly…

Here were those benefits in 2009/10 that I shared with the leaders:

• Collaboration:  As a global company, the more your employees can find out about each other, the quicker they can share ideas or get answers to questions. I shared data that demonstrated that large organizations were working separately to solve the same problems. Sharing the projects digitally helped the staff to identify projects that were complimentary and helped the align their efforts.
• Resource Identification: Getting to know who the experts are is difficult in a large global company. The company email address book was not much help! Add is many of the other enterprise systems and you maybe able to find out some things but could you really trust they were the expert. It is amazing how willing people were to share with others that they only knew worked in the company. People who love what they do, love to share with others!
• Stronger Community: People were already doing this outside of companies firewall, why not bring it in and take full advantage of building your diverse and spread out organizations. I shared the story of a team of testers that were working on testing the latest and greatest before release. One tester at home, discovered a noise coming from his system. The tester team in the labs could not have picked that up, due to the noise level in the labs. There was a definite problem that needed to be fixed before release – it saved some high embarrassment for the company.
• Increased Communication: I knew that we would see increased communications. It is just a matter of time from the start up. With blogs, forums, chats and wiki pages – there were a lot of different avenues for people to communicate. Working with organizations to demonstrate the use cases that best fit their organization was one of the reasons that they knew it was just a matter of time to sign up.
• Innovation: When you can get a large number of people together feeding off of each others ideas for improving or innovating the next product or service – the time from idea to planning is greatly reduced. I demonstrated to several organizations that having a way to capture ideas and vote on them would help the leaders of the group increase the thought leadership of the organization. Many gave it a try!

Here it is late 2015… I wonder if those benefits are still being realized at the company or have they just switched gears? I do know that when I discuss this topic with others from other companies they echo the benefits. In no way is this a complete list, it was the ones that I witnessed happening everyday until I left the company.

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