I’ve heard that email spam got it’s nickname based on the physical behavior of its namesake processed meat product. Apparently you take a large quantity, throw it against a wall and see what sticks…I’ve lived in rural America, sometimes this is what passes for fun.

Unfortunately the scatter-shot approach is sometimes used in early stages of emerging technology deployments. Blogs, Wikis and IM have been no exception. You’ll see skunkworks driven by a well-meaning enthusiast pushing a technology out and justifying it by essentially declaring that ‘if we deploy it, they will come’. More often than not, very few people come. Resources are wasted, management finds out and the entire effort gets a bad name. When the subject is raised again, the resistance is high.

If you’re thinking of deploying a form of social media, it must have a defined value proposition, be aligned to a business process and demonstrably improve or enhance that process: eliminating friction, reducing errors, capturing undocumented data or knowledge and making it easily findable…you get the point.

If you crave a Sharepoint or other collaboration instance, find a project that is broadly distributed. Chances are high that too much of the process and communications is happening between a small number of participants via email and attachments. The rest of the team wonders what’s happening and the lack of visibility leads to a lack of engagement.

Show how document sharing and simple versioning reduces the problem of multiple unsynchronized documents driving people to actions based on the wrong version. Show how a discussion forum can help a person in a regional office stay aligned with a corporate framework, and how a person the the corporate office can learn who does what in the regions, and how they’ve needed to modify that framework to work better in their business environment. In short, show how these tools help people work more efficiently.

Best Practice #2: Show direct business value by aligning social computing to real-world work.

One of the first issues that comes up in the business community when discussing social computing behind the firewall is control. It’s a valid issue – companies can and are held liable for the actions, words and postings of individuals. The expressed concern is that given unfettered ability to post to a blog, wiki, discussion thread or more traditional intranet page, employees will behave badly at worst or incorrectly at best. Most often this point of view comes from the communications disciplines, who sometimes hold a conceptual model of the intranet as analogous to the newsletter or house publication, which of course is the domain of the Editor.

Publication models are still valid, but they’re no longer primary and are rapidly being replaced by transactional and collaborative models that place the value proposition more directly in the hands of the knowledge worker. It’s good to remind our communications colleagues that we’re not publishing when we send emails, we’re using technology to collaborate and share knowledge. It’s easy to see from there that what some social media represents is moving those activities out of the inbox and into the browser. Organizations with sufficient size and maturity have existing communication policies that should adequately cover the forms of communications afforded by social computing.

Sometime in that last century, the intranet I managed featured a threaded discussion forum which was greatly underutilized. An interesting ‘feature’ was that we relied on the honor system for registrations. We required an email address to use the forums and presumed that folks would identify themselves honestly. A group of employees in a service center proved us wrong. These employees were not given email as a policy so to use the forums they simply made up names or even used their personal email addresses (in retrospect, a Bad Idea). At first the group dynamic was light and friendly although they used it conversations about everything except work. Within a few weeks the crowd got larger and the conversations veered towards the street corner. We rang an alarm and pulled the service. Within a few weeks we had tightened governance and included an address verification process which drove anonymity out of the system.

Best practice #1: Trust, but verify. People behave better when they know the rules and are identifiable.

JP Rangaswami speaks of what people really do in the enterprise and how technology can and should assist those human needs. Some sound bites:

“…it is only a matter of time before enterprise software consists of only four types of application: publishing, search, fulfillment and conversation.”

“In an enterprise these relationships are usually to do with the department the person belongs to, and the reporting line. What utter tosh. Those are not relationships. They are irritants. Irritants apparently required in order for people to allocate costs and profits accurately….I am prepared to change my mind on this, the day I meet a customer who cares about what department I work in or whom I report to.”

“…people appear to ‘work’ by doing four things:

They look proactively for information. They search for things.
They receive information because they said they were interested in receiving that information. They subscribe to things.
They talk to each other using various forms of communication: letter, e-mail, audio, video, text, IM, blog, wiki, twitter, whatever. They are even known occasionally to talk to each other face to face without use of technology.
And they transact business as a result. Within the enterprise. In the extended enterprise and partners and supply chain. With customers.

People do all this now. But we do not have the tools to do the job well.”

Thank you, JP for addressing what’s been missing in much the Enterprise 2.o talk of late, that being the question of “why?”. For a long time it seemed like there were two vectors driving the conversation:

a) Pro: “Look at all this AJAX-y goodness! We must bolt this on to our ERP so it doesn’t appear to be so hard to use!”

b) Con: “People are cats, they are unloyal and must be herded. Do not give them freedom to go outside the box (pun intended) or we shall introduce Risk.”

JP highlights the reason social computing has taken off – people are social and desire community. In the enterprise that means we want to work together in a fluid, on-demand manner. Nothing provided in of standard office productivity tool suite does that. They’re fine for turning concepts into artifacts, like insects in amber, but interchange is asynchronous and awkward at best. We fought for IM behind the firewall ten years ago and it’s still unusual to find widespread use.

In my workplace people form virtual teams around projects. Organizationally we’re pretty flat except for natural team groupings around core competencies like graphics, usability, technology, etc. A natural pattern has emerged where folks on a project tend to take over an available space – usually conference rooms – and cluster together so they have proximity to share ideas while their heads are stuck in their laptops creating the artifacts that emerge from their interaction. The fellow whose office is next to mine hasn’t been in it in 6 weeks. They sometimes bring graphics, products and designs into the room that reflect the project that end up being the cave paintings representing their new environment and their recent hunts as they share stories around the virtual fire.

OK – maybe that’s kind of stretching it to the poetic, the point is people require freedom to congregate and bounce off each other if they are going to produce excellence. Malcolm Gladwell holds that modern genius emerges more from collaboration than from the lone insightful person (video here).

I’ve know of an organization whose 3-year plan includes a key feature – Employee Development. Yet they have no training and development resources at the corporate level, and precious few in the businesses. This disconnect is where we find the enterprise; they truly want employees to collaborate. Yet the best tools: audio, video, text, IM, blog, wiki, twitter…are often unavailable or even banned for fear that the cats will be distracted into mere chit-chat.

As I write I see that Michael has asked for thoughts about how social computing tools can play inside the firewall. Consider this a start. I’ll say that the first critical aspect for social computing success in the enterprise would be to ‘trust…but verify’.

More later.