Reconciling the enterprise IT portfolio with social media

With social media features popping up inside existing enterprise applications combined with the crush of enterprise-ready social business platforms, figuring out how to situate social media on an intranet, in content/document management, and within functional verticals inside the has become a significant challenge. Here are some of the key issues for sorting out social media and IT strategy in today’s fast moving marketplace.

Growing component of enterprise communication

Social media is now a growing component of enterprise communication and collaboration, with the latest Frost and Sullivan data from this year showing that out of 200 C-level execs, sixty-nine percent were closely tracking “social media, placing it ahead of telepresence, VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol), shared team spaces, soft phones, and even unified communications and unified messaging.” Half of the respondents say social media is already used within their organization, and 41 percent are using the innovation personally.

This is driving areas of the organization responsible for unified communication, document management, the intranet, and even workflow and business intelligence to address the influx of social media into their respective business functions as vendors add the capabilities and end users increasingly expect or even demand them.

The companies I’ve talked with this year

In the companies I’ve talked with this year, this rapidly changing dynamic has complicated strategic IT planning during also making platform and tool selection the primary focus of attention instead of like as not more important social media adoption issues. During the large enterprise social business vendors just as IBM, Cisco, Jive, and Microsoft all have increasingly mature offerings, sorting out how social media will have presence in the business has become significantly more complex due to rapidly increasing choice, proliferation of social media channels, and poor integration and standards. Companies are working hard this year to get their arms around the accumulating IT issues while together grappling with how social media is transforming the way their organizations connect with and engage with their clients, business partners, and workers.

Contributing to the overall challenge is nearly too much social media choice: Many top enterprise software vendors from Saba and Salesforce to SAP and Oracle are incorporating social media ever deeper into the way their products work. Fortunately, the use of social media features in existing software packages are often optional at this hour. It’s anyway you look at it up to organizations, nevertheless, to determine the manner in which their internal and external service delivery incorporating social media is going to function after a fashion that’s easy to understand by internal business stakeholders.

Along with this, business and IT leaders are struggling to figure out exactly where social media functions belong, both in terms of 1) delivery platform as so then as 2) organizational capability.

For the former, businesses are asking a lot of hard questions these days. Is enterprise social media an intranet function? Or is it part of an social network that runs side-by-side with e-mail and the internal portal? Like as not it’s most at home as part of content and document management? Or like as not it’s a single consistent capability that faces both externally and internally as we’re seeing with Jive and a few other platforms. The answers to this questions largely seem to be yes, nevertheless without an obvious road to connect all of them at the same time into something cohesive.

For the latter, organizations are today are working to determine the best internal home for social media management and oversight. During some are looking at corporate communications and HR, it is IT and the line of business that are often in charge of social media projects in the short-term. Longer term, I’ve written about a move to develop social business units that we’re seeing in more mature organizations, as so then as the more common “triumvirate approach” when organizing for social business that on the whole involves a committee of key stakeholders in HR, brand, corporate communications, and IT.

At this point, organizations are realizing they have to put some serious thought into making organization-wide sense of social media service delivery. Like business were forced to do five to ten years ago with traditional IT, the days of putting off social media strategy and portfolio rationalization has now passed. During I’ve painted a complex picture of the issues and concerns here, the good news is that some businesses are now finding their way and I’ve attempt to synthesize the issues and some potential solutions into a list below.

I would as well like to hear more from those that are tackling social media at a strategic level and share what the issues that you’re coming across. Social business and closely related topics are one of the top areas this year to address on the agendas of many CHROs, CCOs, CIOs, and line of business executives. Sharing what we’re learning as an industry about what works and what doesn’t will greatly help organizations navigate one of the most significant changes to IT in a generation.

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