Question

Discuss the Guidelines for Enterprise Social Networking and how these can be used to bring about change management. (Again address the question comprehensively.)

Answer 1

1. Tie to your business goals: Consider your organization’s overall goals and how more effective collaboration can assist the company in achieving them. Think about how better collaboration and communication will improve customer relationships, knowledge sharing, product development and project management.
2. Know what’s not working now: Determine your current barriers to communication. Is your company’s shared knowledge trapped in e-mail ? Do critical documents get buried in inboxes? Are workers unable to identify peers with expertise that would help in other parts of the company?
3. Choose wisely: Select the technology based on your current barriers/gaps in communication, and not on the specific features. Features are important, but it’s more important to think strategically about how the software will address your challenges.
4. Don’t fix what isn’t broken: Identify which communication and collaboration tools currently work for your employees. You probably don’t need or want to throw out everything you’re already using. In many cases social/collaboration tools are an enhancement not a replacement – at least at first.
5. Think about integration: Consider the existing systems that you are already using and how enterprise social software can – or can’t – integrate with them. Some enterprise social software integrates well with legacy platforms. Others operate as a separate silo. User satisfaction tends to much higher when enterprise social software creates a fabric across existing platforms as opposed to being a standalone platform that doesn’t add value to the systems workers are already using.