Case Study 3: Is Social Business Working Out?

Case Study 3:  Is Social Business Working Out?

Case Study Summary

    In general, most employees are comfortable and adept at utilizing general social networks for personal lives, but the usage of them for business is severely lagging. Though they can be used successfully, there are many examples of poor implementation and failure of attempted usage of social networks within a company.

The implementation however, seems to be the real crux of the failed usage. Since proper implementation and adoption have been successfully displayed, consider the Red Robin implementation of Yammer, at high levels of success, we know that it can be done. But, it is vital that we implement the usage in a manner that inspires employees to attempt to use them, and where they see the benefit of using the social network over continuing to utilize the existing technology.

-  - Identify the management, organization, and technology factors responsible for impeding adoption of internal corporate social networks.

   Management: Employees that are used to collaborating and doing business in more traditional ways need an incentive to use social software. Most companies are not providing that incentive: Only 22 percent of social software users believe the technology to be necessary to their jobs.

   Technology: Ease of use and increased job efficiency are more important than peer pressure in driving adoption of social networking technologies. Most people think the internal social network is at or below the average because they are low adoption rates on the part of employees.

   Organization: The Company found that employees prefer their own way of doing business. Enterprise social networking systems were not at the core of how most of the surveyed companies collaborate. About half of the survey respondents said that internal social networks had “very little impact” on employee retention, the speed of decision making, or the reduction of meetings.

-    -  Compare the experiences implementing internal social networks of the two organizations. Why was one more successful than the other? What role did management play in this process?

  

NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center used a custom-built enterprise social network called Spacebook to help small teams collaborate without e-mailing larger groups. Spacebook failed because it didn’t focus enough on people and didn’t take the organization’s culture and politics into consideration. No one knew how Spacebook would help them do their jobs.

-     -  Should all companies implement internal enterprise social networks? Why or why not?

  

Yes, companies should implement internal enterprise social networks. Because it is cheaper than other systems, with more operability can also reduce the expenses of other departments. When promoting a new system, it is best to promote it from top to bottom, giving top management priority to using the new system and then promoting it to regular employees and adopting appropriate incentives.