Build an Enterprise Social Collaboration Strategy

Enable employees and teams to make their own connections to get the job done.

More Details

Employees are adopting social tools to effectively interact personally with others at an astounding rate.
Tools that enable the same type of peer-to-peer network building among employees are enterprise-ready, but most enterprise collaboration strategies are not ready.
Vendors of collaboration platforms and enterprise applications (CRM, ERP, etc.) are rapidly adding social collaboration tools to their products.
The majority of Info-Tech’s clients plan to upgrade to Microsoft SharePoint 2010 within two years. SharePoint 2010 is tightly integrated around social tools and will force companies into social collaboration, whether they are ready or not.

Critical Insight

Organizational hierarchies are valuable for resource management but are not sufficient as a framework for employee-to-employee (E2E) interaction.
Enabling employees and teams to form direct (peer) connections to other employees and teams based upon knowledge and expertise shortens cycle times, improves knowledge reuse, and builds long-lasting relationships between employees across organizational boundaries.
Social collaboration tools, used in conjunction with traditional collaboration tools, enable employees to share (syndicate) their expertise and activities and to follow (subscribe to) the activities of other employees whose work activities are complementary.

Impact and Result

Understand what value social collaboration tools add to traditional collaboration in order to build or update the organization’s collaboration strategy.
Design collaboration strategy around common and repeatable employee collaboration patterns, not tools, to produce collaboration solutions that effectively blend social and traditional collaboration.
Review the current collaboration product market segmentation to make sound upgrade and/or procurement decisions from among the options of collaboration platform vendors, especially MS SharePoint 2010, pure-play social collaboration vendors, and enterprise application vendors (CRM, ERP, etc.).
Encourage a culture of collaboration across the organization to effectively implement collaboration solutions that include social collaboration.

Understand the value of social collaboration tools and how to map these tools to collaboration patterns.
Build an effective E2E collaboration strategy.
- Storyboard: Build an Enterprise Social Collaboration Strategy
- Building an Enterprise Social Collaboration Strategy
Assess organizational readiness for social tools and develop a business plan for effective implementation.
Produce collaboration solutions that blend social and traditional collaboration.
- Social Collaboration Business Plan Template
- Social Collaboration Maturity and Readiness Assessment