Launching Enterprise Social

The 3 Workstreams for Successful Deployment

There is an interesting dynamic at play regarding Enterprise Social Networking (ESN). On the one hand, executives say “the importance of social business is mounting,” when surveyed by MIT’s Sloan Business School and Deloitte. On the other, this is a struggle for most organizations and Gartner predicts that won’t change anytime soon.

As a Customer Success Manager (CSM) at Yammer, whose day’s are spent helping companies achieve business value with ESN, this is a particularly interesting dichotomy. This led our CSM team to wonder, “if ESN is so important, why is it so hard to get it right.” We decided to start from the beginning and examine if the process through which an ESN is deployed contributes to the lag in time-to-value.

My colleague Steve Nguyen began the discussion, exploring the perception challenge the term “pilot” has when applied to your ESN launch. That said, it’s important to clarify that successful ESN deployments do have a “soft launch” approach. The purpose of this post is to begin describing what that process looks like.

A successful “soft launch” should lay the foundation for sustained engagement and orient activity towards achieving business value. This approach consists of three workstreams: Technical Proof of Concept (POC), Network Preparation, and Business Value, all progressing in parallel. In this post we’ll explore the POC and Network Preparation aspects, saving Business Value for a future post.

Proof of Concept

Not unlike those within traditional IT pilots, a soft launch can include testing and validation to ensure requirements like Directory Sync, Single Sign-on, and other system integration work as intended. This helps companies plan and establish a support process for the network, and ensures a streamlined end-user experience.

However, organizations often overemphasize the importance of these technical aspects and should keep in mind two key characteristics:

1. It’s in the cloud. Without the need to set up hardware, IT involvement is less critical. This allows POCs to run in conjunction, with the other two workstreams.
2. The goal is collaboration. Thus, success is not determined by the actual implementation of the tool, but through employee adoption and engagement.

Network Preparation

The goal of Network Preparation is to ensure the long term health of the network. The primary focus is on the stakeholders and capabilities responsible for ongoing adoption and engagement. This can be broken down into three pillars:

1. Executive Engagement. In order to identify and address potential roadblocks, it’s key to raise awareness and elicit feedback early on across the C-suite. Executive support will legitimize the platform, establishing it as a sanctioned tool for getting work done. Further, executive participation is a central driver of end-user adoption, once the tool is broadly deployed.
2. Community Management. Community Managers are change agents, helping employees use social to work more openly and efficiently. They play a key role in driving adoption and fostering activity to support business objectives. Community Roundtable’s recent study found that active community management correlates to higher end-user engagement.
3. Communication/Training. While ESN’s such as Yammer have an intuitive look and feel, employees still need to understand why it’s important and how to use it. It’s important employees use social in the context of their role.

Business Value

In conjunction with the POC and Network Preparation described above, successful ESN launches also identify Business Value within the network. This is the most strategic workstream, involving senior leadership and participation from multiple business units. For a deeper dive into the Business Value work stream, I encourage you to read my colleague Steve Somer’s post, “How Does Your Garden Grow.”