case study : IS SOCIAL BUSINESS WORKING OUT?

IS SOCIAL BUSINESS WORKING OUT?

1. 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.

Organization:

 Companies that have tried to deploy internal social networks have found that employees are used to doing business in a certain way and overcoming the organizational inertia can prove difficult. 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.

Technology:

 Ease of use and increased job efficiency are more important than peer pressure in driving adoption of social networking technologies. A majority of IT professionals consider their own internal social networks to be merely average or below average and the biggest reason they cite is low adoption rates on the part of employees. Content on the networks needs to be relevant, up-to-date, and easy to access; users need to be able to connect to people that have the information they need, and that would otherwise be out of reach or difficult to reach.

2. Compare the experiences for 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. User profiles, group workspaces like file sharing, wikis, discussion forums, and groups were included in the platform. 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.

The Red Robin hamburger restaurant chain took a viral approach to drive adoption of its social networking system that uses Microsoft Yammer software. The company’s CIO sees a movement away from e-mail and collaboration portals such as SharePoint toward social networking and texting. He wants to let people create conversations, perform status updates, upload and share files, and set up workgroups for small project teams.

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

Yes , I think so .If used correctly, companies that implement internal enterprise social networks can have terrific results such as cutting expenses or closing underperforming businesses.  If not properly done there could be numerous problems such as security breaches and basically just the waste of company resources and time.