The new era of social business

Long-term: Provide sustainable programs for ongoing social maturity

Demonstrate leadership with executive peers by showing them the potential of social business strategy to transform the enterprise with examples from competitors and other industries. At the same time, empower the IT social business council to determine what longer-term strategies and tactics take priority for IT:

• Facilitate existing social efforts across the organization. Seek out social technology initiatives across the organization. When islands of social technologies are uncovered, use those as discussion points to bring consensus toward the need for a comprehensive strategy. In one FMCG (fast moving consumer goods) manufacturer, IT discovered production staff using Twitter to help coordinate staff and supplies in emergency situations. IT helped them move to Yammer as a more secure microblogging channel and continued to support the initiative as a demonstrated solution to a business challenge.
• Empower a team to implement social business strategy. CIOs will need new roles to turn social business strategies into reality-including technical resources to develop a sound architectural roadmap for social technologies and more business-savvy folks to connect the dots between business strategy and social technology innovation. That could be as modest as building a small team within your enterprise architecture organization focused on social business architecture-or as bullish as creating a digital business team completely separate from IT. For example, the CIO of one multinational food services business has established a digital business team separate from IT, in part to avoid the team getting mired in IT bureaucracy. The CIO now has overall responsibility for the company's digital business strategy, bridging IT and marketing.
• Turn IT into a social technology role model. Whatever the scale of IT, there is potential for increasing IT's effectiveness through the adoption of social technologies. Empower IT staff to experiment with social technologies across all aspects of delivering IT services. Not only will experimentation yield potentially significant gains for IT productivity, it will also increase the IT staff's ability to support social initiatives across the enterprise. For example, a large pharmaceutical manufacturer's IT team is using microblogging as an internal self-help channel for IT support across the organization. Such efforts allow IT to share the burden of technology support with technology experts across the organization, while also learning how to support and sustain an internal social platform.
• Help your organization build a layered defense against social media risks. You are much more likely to share personal information or click a link if the request came from someone who is in your social network. There is a real danger of cybercriminals using social technologies to reach unsuspecting employees in your organization and get into your corporate network. Take the lead in establishing policies, processes and technologies to help protect the interests of the organization. Use technologies to manage and monitor your social traffic, but most importantly, consider your people to be the first line of defense. For example, Intel has focused on developing a security-conscious workforce by focusing on educating its users, developing and communicating a social policy, and providing additional social media training to users.
• Experiment with video. Video is one of the most exciting and challenging social technologies. Exciting because it opens up new opportunities to involve employees in solving business and customer challenges. Challenging because of its network bandwidth requirements. IT can begin to experiment with using video, get ahead of the learning curve and prepare for needed bandwidth expansion in the future. While IT can begin to use video to help with new technology training, teaming up with another department will have an even greater impact. For example, Rob Sharpe at Stanley Black & Decker uses video to create a learning library for sales. Employees contribute videos to the library explaining how to use various tools. That has helped drive real reductions in the time and cost to ramp new salespeople and helped drive higher sales.
• Challenge vendors with outcome-based contracts. Social technology and ERP vendors are just starting to learn how to deliver effective social integration in support of social business strategy. No matter which vendors you eventually select to partner in the implementation of your social business strategy, it's smart to get them aligned using outcome-based contracts to turn IT suppliers into business partners. Although outcome-based contracts are not unique to social vendors, the general lack of experience in this field increases the risk associated with social technology initiatives-outcome-based contracts help mitigate that increased risk.

By getting IT ahead of social technologies, CIOs will be in a stronger position to collaborate with the CMO and other executives in developing a social business strategy that sets the organization up to compete effectively in the new era of social business.