Six Keys for Your Social Collaboration Strategy

5th July, 2013 - Posted by admin - No Comments

With a growing number of remote and geographically dispersed employees, travelers on the High Tech Highway are seeking new ways to engage, interact and collaborate. One of the fastest growing solutions continues to be social collaboration.

In today’s Roundup, we take a look at some helpful tips for crafting your social collaboration strategy as well as ways to take your enterprise social network to the next level. Let’s hit the road:

Six Keys for Your Social Collaboration Strategy
Of the hottest enterprise information management trends, social collaboration is the most familiar to users already. But that doesn’t make its selection and ROI any easier for enterprise data decision makers. So what should you weigh when considering strategies and tools for enterprise social networks (ESNs) and collaboration suites?

A recent Information Management article offers six considerations for a successful social collaboration strategy:

1. Focus on more than technology

2. Don’t think cheap

3. Pace yourself

4. Email isn’t going anywhere

5. Put social in the palm of your hand

6. Avoid the social silo

Social Collaboration Continues to Grow
A recent survey conducted by Avanade shows two thirds of companies are using some sort of social collaboration tool, with a similar amount saying these tools enable them to generate ideas and communicate better. “Of these companies, 98% said they have seen benefits as a result of their use of social collaboration tools. But while enterprises are seeing the benefits of social collaboration, there are still lots of issues to overcome,” says Avanade CTO, Rudi Greyling.

According to the research, many companies have realized that their employees want to collaborate in the work environment in the same way they collaborate socially and have allowed staff to collaborate using consumer tools like Twitter and Facebook. However, Greyling cautions against this, because enterprises are not able to properly monitor these tools, potentially jeopardizing the security of confidential information.

The study outlines successful enterprise social collaboration tools as those that track what happens and offer safeguards, allowing the enterprise to monitor what information is flowing into and out of the business, as well as monitoring who logs onto the tool.

Taking Social Collaboration to the Next Level
In this growing digital economy, success of the individual and the organization depends on the ability to amplify learning and accelerate performance improvement within large, diverse ecosystems, according to a recent article in Information Week.

In order to accomplish this, organizations must build environments or “creation spaces,” that “combine the advantages of tightly-knit teams with the ability to scale to encompass increasing numbers of participants.”

The obstacle, however, is in the fact that teams don’t scale. According to the article, “once [teams] reach a certain size, teams begin to fragment and lose the deep connection that drives rapid learning.” This can be overcome by embracing creation spaces, however. Creation spaces address the issue through a set of platforms and resources that team members can use to connect with others. Resources can include discussion forums, easily searchable archives, reputation profiles, videos, simulations and a host of other problem-solving tools that encourage interactions between teams.

Be sure to read the full article for elements that make successful creation spaces and what it means for IT teams.