Enterprise Social Collaboration Reality Check

Why IT’s not working

An overwhelming majority of IT-driven enterprise social collaboration projects deliver zero business value and fail to gain any relevant adoption. They’re a waste of time and money. Abject failures.

By definition social content is unstructured and social collaboration organic. Social collaboration and corporate bureaucracy are essentially exact opposites. It’s no surprise enterprise bureaucracy fails to deliver.

Social is working. You call it Shadow IT

Despite reports from Gartner and the weekly corporate IT meetings, social collaboration is alive and well in the enterprise. It’s more vibrant and effective today than it ever has been. It’s even working great on mobile devices!

However it doesn’t fit in the bureaucracy, so it’s called Shadow IT.

What’s the best example?

Dropbox. More than 20% of employees at Kansas City’s leading enterprises likeCerner Corporation and Hallmark leverage Dropbox at work. In just two firms, thousands and thousands of employees sharing and talking about many terabytes of content. Massive, organic adoption. People are collaborating on videos, images, comments, documents, drawings, etc. etc. etc.

Enterprise social networking focuses on the use of online social networks or social relations among people who share business interests and/or activities. — Wikipedia

People organizing and collaborating organically because of shared interests. Social collaboration defined.

Below is a diagram of how a majority of corporate IT teams are leveraging this opportunity.

Consumerization friend or foe?

Consumerization is THE reality. Work with this trend and the opportunities are limitless. Work against it and you’ll be destroyed by irrelevance. If it was up to corporate IT, we’d all still be using a Blackberry. There’d be no iPhone, much less iPads and Macs in the enterprise.

Bureaucracy will protect itself at all costs — that’s the whole point. The goal of bureaucracy is to remove variables from the system and to keep variables out of the system in the first place. A “threat” is any change to the status quo, good or bad.

Consumerization can’t be controlled. But it can be managed. The first step is bringing it out of the shadows. The rest of the company just calls it ‘working’.