Business Social Networking Upside-Downside

Social media tools are entering the workplace, either by thoughtful intent or purely by accident. To date, for those organizations that actually have a plan of action, most tend to focus more on "damage containment" policies for their employees.

Is a protection-centric strategy the prudent approach for concerned -- but otherwise uninformed -- business leaders, or is it shortsighted thinking that undervalues the upside opportunity?

Cisco released the results of a third-party global market study designed to assess how organizations use consumer social networking tools to collaborate externally.

The use of these tools, such as Facebook and Twitter, are connecting organizations with their external stakeholders. On the upside, the tools connect people and information, establish potential new routes to market, and enhance customer intimacy and brand awareness.

According to the third-party researcher, the study findings indicate that we're at the early stages of adoption and in the process of identifying key challenges -- such as the need for increased governance and IT involvement.

Market Study Highlights
Of the organizations interviewed, 75 percent identified social networks as the consumer-based social media tools they primarily use, while roughly 50 percent of the group also identified extensive use of microblogging.

Social networking tools are spreading into core business areas, including marketing, human relations, and customer service. Within marketing and communications, these tools have already become an integral part of early-adopter initiatives.

Small and medium-sized businesses are actively using social networking channels to generate sales leads, but this remains a growth opportunity for larger companies.

Only one in seven of the companies that participated in the research noted a formal process associated with adopting consumer-based social networking tools for business purposes.

Only one in five participants identified any policies in place concerning the use of consumer-based social networking in the enterprise. Within the respondent base, social networking governance typically involves more stakeholders than standard corporate initiatives.

Due to the unstructured nature of social networking, companies continue to struggle with policy creation and adoption, as copying an established governance process from other more structured areas often doesn't work for social networking.

Only one in 10 respondents noted direct IT involvement in externally facing social networking initiatives. Although IT typically isn't involved as a primary decision maker, respondents did recognize the need for these tools to scale and properly integrate with existing business processes to reap maximum benefits.

The new study is based on extensive interviews with 105 participants representing 97 organizations in 20 countries around the globe. Conducted between April and September 2009, the research was carried out by leading business schools in the United States and Europe.

Five Proven Benefits of Cloud Services

How can your company get started with cloud computing? Well, consider following the market leaders. With a few more months of client experience, Forrester Research recently addressed the major questions that executives have about the adoption of cloud services.

The key benefits that most early adopters report do not start with costs -- but rather with business flexibility. According to those that have deployed it, the benefits of cloud computing, in order of importance, are:

1. Improving time-to-application deployment. Cloud platforms give you the option of developing and deploying new applications on existing infrastructure as quickly as desired. Traditional platforms can take up to three or four months to procure, install, and configure, stalling the application deployment process.

2. Aligning IT budgets with application demand. How many Web applications does your organization deploy without exactly knowing how popular they’ll be or how much capacity you’ll need to accommodate that popularity? Many of the early cloud adopters host customer and public-facing Web applications with cloud providers for this reason. They can pay just for the resources they use, hour by hour.

3. Accommodating peaks in demand for data center capacity. Cloud computing is also good for handling episodic spikes in demand for computing, storage, and network resources. Rather than provision for the expected peak of the holiday shopping season, retailers can push the additional demand into a cloud environment. Big batch jobs also fit this model.

4. Delivering applications without raising the budget. Cloud computing gives you the ability to deliver new applications without having to buy systems, avoiding an investment of your firm’s capital in new equipment. Application development and delivery can all be handled using pay-as-you-go operating expenses.

5. Sharing without putting the data center at risk. Many of the early adopters of cloud computing are looking for an inexpensive and easily accessible way to share information. Medical researchers are an example. Cloud services enable these organizations to host data on public clouds, rather than making their internal data center available to external parties.

Three Questions to Ask a Cloud Service Provider
How do you know if a managed cloud service provider is a good-fit for your business? Forrester concludes that you should ask all providers the following three basic questions:

• What are your enterprise references and what kinds of applications do those organizations run in your cloud?
• For which application scenarios does your cloud environment deliver the maximum flexibility and scalability?
• What security and reliability commitments do you make to your customers?
  

Revelations from Online Collaboration Adopters

Cisco conducted one of the first comprehensive studies of the factors associated with successful adoption of network-based collaboration solutions. You can use the study results to maximize your return on investment from today's online collaboration tools.

One way is to implement business practices shown to lead to more enthusiastic collaboration. Another is to identify and then actively support the employees who are most likely to benefit.

Twenty First Century Collaboration
Collaboration is a process that brings people and information together to accomplish a common goal. What's new today is that in a connected world, people no longer have to be in the same location, time zone, or culture to collaborate.

Tools such as videoconferencing (or TelePresence) and web sharing enable real-time collaboration across distance. Blogs, wikis, and shared workspaces enable online collaboration across time boundaries.

Cisco conducted the first formal segmentation study of collaboration tool users. Their objective was to understand how workers choose to collaborate, which tools they use, and how they believe those tools positively affect productivity, innovation, and cost savings.

Study participant collaboration habits and attitudes placed them into one of four segments: Collaboration Enthusiasts, Comfortable Collaborators, Reluctant Collaborators, and Collaboration Laggards.

Lessons Learned and Best Practices
The results from the Cisco collaboration segmentation study suggest that organizations experience the greatest productivity benefits from collaboration when they:

• Recognize that personal attitudes and organizational culture regarding collaboration are as important as collaboration tools.
• Begin by introducing collaboration tools to people and groups meeting the characteristics of Enthusiasts and Comfortable Collaborators. These people tend to be managers or supervisors, have held their job position for 3 to 10 years, and are already using Web 2.0 tools at home.
• Encourage executives to model the desired collaboration practices.
• Reward collaboration by including it in performance reviews, offering rewards for successful outcomes, or both.
• Implement formal collaboration processes. Provide the tools, IT support, and training needed to foster increased collaboration.
  

The survey studied 800 people in a wide variety of U.S. medium-sized and enterprise organizations who: spend at least 20 percent of time at work using a network-connected computer; use a mobile phone or handheld device; and participated in two collaborative activities within the past month.

Enabling the Early-Adopters to Thrive
The researchers conducted a segmentation analysis, separating individuals into distinct groups based on a large set of attitudinal and behavioral variables. Previous knowledge of collaboration habits did not include the personal or cultural factors that influence success.

Do you proactively nurture a culture of collaboration in your organization? What obstacles did you have to overcome before your employees could fully utilize the latest online productivity tools?