Social Tools: Ready for the Enterprise?

Cutter has published a report I wrote for them, called “Social Tools: Ready for the Enterprise?” They also published an interview with Rick Saia:

Social Tools: Ready for the Enterprise?

An interview with Stowe Boyd, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

In this interview, Stowe Boyd talks about how technological “social tools” can benefit today’s organization. This was the theme of his recent Executive Report in Cutter’s Business Intelligence Advisory Service.

Q: Your latest Executive Report for the Business Intelligence Advisory Service addressed the issue of how social tools can work in today’s enterprise. Is there any “low-hanging fruit” in the corporation that executives can pick easily by applying these tools within their IT architectures? If so, what are they?

Yes, there are some. One example I develop in the report is the application of blogging (weblogging) tools as a means to support communication in project teams. Blogging is easy to learn, the tools are inexpensive, and the benefits to project team productivity are generally immediate. When people shift to publishing and commenting on project-related issues on blogs, there is a corresponding decrease in broadcast e-mails, information exchange meetings, and voice mail.

Q: A CFO might respond to a proposal for implementing a “social tool” as “something that’s nice to have rather than something that we really need.” What might an IT executive - and a business-unit executive who likes the idea - say to help the CFO see his or her point of view and possibly change someone’s mind?

In the report, I examine the motivations behind the use of social networking technologies in sales and business development. Almost every company would like to influence the key metrics around selling - length of sales cycle, deal size, probability of close, and so on. For large firms, even a few percentage point shift in any of these indices could translate into millions. The investment of (US) $100,000 to potentially gain millions is not a “nice to have”; it’s a no-brainer.

Q: If there are three major benefits a company can derive from implementing social tools, what would you say they are, and why?

Better internal collaboration, better and more authentic interaction with the marketplace of customers and potential customers, and a better approach to the sales process. Basically anywhere that social capital is valued, social tools can play a role.

Q: Tell us about the importance of swarm intelligence and “swarmth.”

Swarm intelligence is simply the observation that a group of people — each operating without global understanding — can collectively come up with smart solutions, even when, individually, they couldn’t. In this view, the intelligence of the group is an emergent property of the social network that arises through group communication and collaboration. We all know that people’s abilities and contributions are uneven: but in self-organizing societies, the members judge each other’s contributions, and as a result, those who are judged to be better contributors build a reputation. In many social tools, this reputation is made tangible: in the Slashdot (http://slashdot.org) tech forum, for example it is called “karma.” I like to call it “swarmth” — a measure of social network value based on the collective judgment of your peers.

Q. Lastly, why do you take such a high level of interest in social tools?

Social tools are the most recent advance in communication and collaboration technologies. But unlike earlier solutions like e-mail, IM, and groupware, this generation of software is intentionally shifting how we interact, not just as a side effect of managing content, or structuring contexts for interaction. These tools are designed from the start to guide human behavior into new paths and patterns, to counter prevailing ways of interaction. I call these social tools: software intended to shape culture. I coined the term in 1999, so I have been stuck in this rut for five years.

Click here for information on ordering the report.