Social Network Analysis Can Save a Re-Branded Corporate Social Computing

Our latest research highlights that only 26% of Australia's large-enterprise organisations are actively planning or currently using corporate social computing. That's a staggering 74% that are stating a lack of intention, are simply considering it, or don't even know what it is. This suggests to us that the growth in this area being claimed by the vendors is about product not outcome.  
 
On that basis can anyone who is about to purchase social computing software with end of financial year budget under-spends please STOP. Don't do it. If there is one thing we still see regular confusion around it's the corporate application of social computing. So, chances are you too will get it wrong and waste your money, or worse still, blow the reputation of the ICT organisation at a low point in the business cycle. But there is hope.
 
Despite the fast adoption rates of Lotus Connections and SharePoint Server more than a few people we speak to are beginning to wonder if IBM, Microsoft and others have got it wrong. I don't believe they have. Instead it's probably as simple as poor branding. Remember when no one would buy a Lucky Goldstar television? Now everyone wants to own LG plasmas, fridges, mobile phones or any other form of electrical device or whitegoods with the LG smiley face. Corporate social computing is a Lucky Goldstar in need of a makeover.
 
Corporate social computing has always sounded like a part-time name; as if the world was just waiting for something better to come along. The name tried to say the right thing; that there was a raw human element to this new computing stuff. The fact is that the first attempt to label this phenomenon has been lost in translation. The technology behind the concept came about so quickly that the mother of invention had to slap a name on this new baby before it had even drawn its first breath. Thankfully in the rush to Web 2.0 and the social networking boom driven by the alphabet generation the misnomer is not anyone's fault in particular, but that does not mean we shouldn't try to change it.  
 
A better name may well have been bio-networking, bionetwork communications, or something akin to the chromosomal depiction that a manifested social network represents: DNA, double-helix, or bio- mesh computing. However, the reality is that the only way it is going to change now is if IBM or Microsoft get behind the idea and rewire the marketing brains of technophiles the world over.  This will be something that requires an Obama-style intervention. With IBM having the pre-eminent corporate solution on the market they stand the greatest chance of making the change. It will be at their own peril if they don't.
 
The first challenge for whichever firm takes up the crusade is that only one of the two sides to the social computing adoption story is being told. There are social computing technologies, and then there are social computing networks. The first side of this story is currently being marketed as social computing, essentially a new software family that allows exploitation of implicit knowledge and relationships within a people-based network. It involves new collaborative tools that enable organisations to tap and enable people's collective knowledge and skills. This new family includes everything from blogging and micro-blogging (i.e. Twitter), through to wikis, meta-tagging, and profiling applications.  
 
The second part of the story has nothing to do with technology and it is this part that has been hi- jacked by the technology spin, but represents the greatest opportunity for business change. It is about the social leverage and productivity of the people network within businesses. It consists of the mavens, connectors and brokers that Malcolm Gladwell describes in his book The Tipping Point. It involves viral stakeholders, collaborative centres of excellence, influencers and subject matter experts.  

The crucial point in identifying the differences between these two is that while many organisations may already have social computing technologies within their organisation, EVERY organisation has a social network operating within it. And it is the measurement of the productive capacity of the people network within an organisation which is the most crucial to the adoption of this new software; software that whilst successfully shipped, has so far been poorly exploited and implemented.
 
Both IBM and Microsoft have both made statements that their respective offerings are the fastest selling software product in both company's histories. Oracle is the latest to jump into the collaborative-social mix with the Beehive offering. It can be argued that Australia's Atlassian provides the best stand-alone wiki technology. Each of these statements is significant because they mean that people perceive a problem or recognize the need to enable an existing activity with a software solution. The reason we aren't seeing more success stories is because organisations are trying to figure out how best to adopt their purchases; a condition that afflicted proprietary enterprise application integration in the early-mid 1990's. And they're getting there despite the confusion in the messaging.

While we are under non-disclosure in relation to which significant organisations have purchased such solutions, we can share with you the crucial secret to adoption that the early adopters appear not to have taken; social network analysis.   

A social network actually has a physical manifestation. It looks like something; and the something it looks like appears at Figure 1. Once it is graphically displayed it is easy to look at and begin to analyse and understand the following key facts about your organisation to assist in change, process and performance improvements:  

The real experts: where are the experts operating within your organisation and how can you begin to measure their "interactional" output? Those who know most about your organisation work within your business. Crucially, social network analysis uncovers where these experts are, and what they know. They invariably may not be the ones with the high-paid titles.  
 
Knowledge leakage: From the same representation it is also possible to visualise organisational knowledge leaking from the extremities of your business and measure how much of it is walking away. It would also be easy to identify which branch of your organisation's social network tree (or DNA) represented the alumni network, if in fact your organisation is one of the many that has adopted such an approach to stave off the loss of corporate knowledge.  
 
Speed-Distance to information: It is possible to see where new initiatives should be focused to ensure that staff are empowered with information, and measure how quickly it spreads.
Social network analysis can uncover bottle-necks, and unstructured hierarchies crucial to the flow of information within your organisation.   
 
 
The process to understand these facts before embarking on business aligned technology purchases is called social network analysis. The software to tap this network, and make this achievable is what is currently known as corporate social computing. However, in the absence of emphasis on social network analysis by the purveyors of the ICT solution, organisations have struggled with what to measure or how.
 
Therefore the default position for the industry has been to measure what Longhaus call peak eyeballs.

Roughly translated this equates to how many friends you have on Facebook, or how many connections you may have on Linked In. It is akin to measuring hits on a website. For business adoption that simplistic approach is flawed and organisations must revert to the tried and trusted measurement and evidence-based approaches so that they know how to assimilate the true value of their corporate social networks and link this with their business outputs. Furthermore, organisations haven't grasped the concepts and differences of interactional processing (i.e. non-transactional), social software strategies simply don't currently exist, and consumer utilisation of social computing that bleeds across into employee roles continues to cloud the solution.  
 
This dissonance can be addressed through a social network analysis exercise but for now both the language and portfolio of corporate social computing software and its relationship to collaborative solutions is still far too confusing to be a meaningful value-add to organisations. At a minimum it is incumbent on the major software players to take a lead from Lucky Goldstar and accept that a branding change would be a much needed start, while for the end-user enterprise in 2009, undertaking or seeking a consultative social network analysis of your own organisation should be a mandatory undertaking.