Identify the people, organization, and technology factors responsible for impeding adoption of internal corporate social networks

Business Problem-Solving Case Social Business: Full Speed Ahead or Proceed with Caution?

As companies become more dispersed in the global marketplace, employees are turning increasingly to workplace collaboration technology, including tools for internal social networking. According to Craig Le

Clair, principal analyst for enterprise architecture at Forrester Research, 50 percent of global workers by 2020 will be between 20 and 35 years old. These employees are experienced users of texting, messaging,

wikis, and Facebook and appreciate work tools like the social media and chat apps used in their private lives.

Adoption of internal social networking inside the company, often referred to as enterprise social networking, is also being driven by the flood of email that employees typically receive each day and are increasingly

unable to handle. Hundreds of email messages must be opened, read, answered, forwarded, or deleted. For example, too much email is what drove Hawk Ridge Systems to adopt Glip, a cloud-based social tool for its

200 employees located in 15 offices in the United States and Canada. Glip features real-time messaging, group chat, videoconferencing, shared calendars, task management, and file sharing all in one place. Glip

helped Hawk Ridge operations manager Samuel Eakin go from 200 to around 30 emails per day. Another driver of enterprise social networking is “app fatigue.” In order to collaborate, many employees have to log

on to numerous apps, creating additional work. Contemporary enterprise social networking systems often integrate multiple capabilities in one place.

A recent survey of 421 professionals conducted by Harvard Business Review Analytics Services found that

collaboration tools could be effective in boosting efficiency and productivity while enabling users to make better business decisions. The products also expanded the potential for innovation. However, not all

companies are successfully using them. Implementation and adoption of enterprise social networking depends not only on the capabilities of the technology but on the organization’s culture and the compatibility

of these tools with the firm’s business processes.

When firms introduce new social media technology (as well as other technologies), a sizable number of

employees resist the new tools, clinging to old ways of working, including email, because they are more familiar and comfortable. There are companies where employees have duplicated communication on both

social media and email, increasing the time and cost of performing their jobs. BASF, the world’s largest chemical producer with subsidiaries and joint ventures in more than 80 countries, prohibited some project

teams from using email to encourage employees to use new social media tools.

Social business requires a change in thinking, including the ability to view the organization more

democratically in a flatter and more horizontal way. A social business is much more open to everyone’s ideas. A secretary, assembly line worker, or sales clerk might be the source of the next big idea. As a result,

getting people to espouse social business tools requires more of a “pull” approach, one that engages workers and offers them a significantly better way to work. In most cases, they can’t be forced to use social

apps.

Enterprise capabilities for managing social networks and sharing digital content can help or hurt an

organization. Social networks can provide rich and diverse sources of information that enhance

organizational productivity, efficiency, and innovation, or they can be used to support preexisting groups of

like-minded people who are reluctant to communicate and exchange knowledge with outsiders. Productivity and morale will fall if employees use internal social networks to criticize others or pursue personal agendas.

Social business applications modeled on consumer-facing platforms such as Facebook and Twitter will not

necessarily work well in an organization or organizational department that has incompatible objectives. Will the firm use social business for operations, human resources, or innovation? The social media platform that

will work best depends on its specific business purpose.

This means that instead of focusing on the technology, businesses should first identify how social initiatives

will actually improve work practices for employees and managers. They need a detailed understanding of social networks: how people are currently working, with whom they are working, what their needs are, and

measures for overcoming employee biases and resistance.

A successful social business strategy requires leadership and behavioral changes. Just sponsoring a social

project is not enough—managers need to demonstrate their commitment to a more open, transparent work style. Employees who are used to collaborating and doing business in more traditional ways need an

incentive to use social software. Changing an organization to work in a different way requires enlisting those most engaged and interested in designing and building the right workplace environment for using social

technologies

Management needs to ensure that the internal and external social networking efforts of the company are

providing genuine value to the business. Content on the networks needs to be relevant, up to date, and easy to access; users need to be able to connect to people who have the information they need and who would

otherwise be out of reach or difficult to reach. Social business tools should be appropriate for the tasks on hand and the organization’s business processes, and users need to understand how and why to use them.

For example, NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center had to abandon a custom-built enterprise social network called Spacebook because no one knew how its social tools would help people do their jobs. Spacebook

was launched in 2009 to help small teams collaborate without emailing larger groups. Spacebook featured user profiles, group workspaces (wikis, file sharing, discussion forums, groups), and social bookmarks. Very

few users adopted it, and Spacebook was decommissioned on June 1, 2012. According to Kevin Jones, a consulting social and organizational strategist at NASA’s Marshall and Goddard Space Flight Centers,

Spacebook failed because it didn’t focus enough on people. It had been designed and developed without taking into consideration the organization’s culture and politics. No one knew how Spacebook would help

them do their jobs as opposed to an existing method of collaboration such as email. This is not an isolated phenomenon. Dimension Data found that one-fourth of the 900 enterprises it surveyed focused more on the

successful implementation of collaboration technology than how it’s used and adopted.

Despite the challenges associated with launching an internal social network, there are companies using

these networks successfully. For example, Covestro, a leading global supplier of coatings and adhesives, polyurethanes, and highly impact-resistant plastics, made social collaboration a success by making the tools

more accessible, demonstrating the value of these tools in pilot projects, employing a reverse mentoring program for senior executives, and training employee experts to spread know-how of the new social tools

and approaches within the company and demonstrate their usefulness. Using IBM Connections as the social

business toolset, Covestro’s efforts are now paying off: 50 percent of employees are now routinely active in the company’s enterprise social network. Although ROI on social business initiatives has been difficult to

measure, Covestro has benefited from faster knowledge flows, increased efficiency, and lower operating costs.

Another company that has made social business work is Carlo’s Bake Shop, an old family-owned business

that is the star of the Cake Boss reality television series on the cable television network TLC. The company has 10 locations in New Jersey, New York, and Las Vegas, and people can order custom cakes from its

website. Thanks to the popularity of Cake Boss, which created a huge upsurge in demand for Carlo’s products, the firm is looking to create a national presence over the next few years.

However, store operations were holding the company back. Carlo’s was heavily paper-based, and the mountain of paperwork wasted employee time and led to errors, which sometimes resulted in a need to fix or

remake cakes or offer partial or total refunds to customers. Custom orders were on paper and carbon paper, order forms were misplaced or lost, and people couldn’t read the handwriting from the order taker.

In the latter half of 2012, Carlo’s implemented Salesforce CRM with the Salesforce social networking tool Chatter as a solution. Some employees and members of Carlo’s management team initially resisted the new

system. They believed that since they already used email, Facebook, and Twitter, they didn’t need another social tool. The company was able to demonstrate the benefits of social business to bakers and store sales

teams, and using Chatter changed the way they worked.

Carlo’s produces a very large volume of custom cakes from a 75,000-square-foot commissary in Jersey City

operating around the clock. Chatter is now the de facto standard for internal communication, from order to delivery. If a key cake decorator is away, that person is still included in the communication and discussion

process. Upon returning, the decorator can view any changes in color, shape, or design.

Because Carlo’s employees now work more socially, errors are down by more than 30 percent, and crews

are able to produce cakes and other custom products more rapidly and efficiently. Managers have access to a data and analytics dashboard that allows them to instantly view store performance and which products are

hot and which are not. They can see sales and transaction patterns in depth. As Carlo’s expands nationally and perhaps globally, the ability to connect people and view order streams is critical. Social business tools

have transformed an organization that was gradually sinking under the weight of paper into a highly efficient digital business.

Sources: Sue Hildreth, “What’s Next for Workplace Collaboration?” searchcontentmanagement.com, March 2, 2017; Arunima Majumdar, “3 Reasons Why

Collaboration Tools Fail to Make the Indented Impact,” eLearning Industry, January 20, 2017; Margaret Jones, “Top Four Social Collaboration Software Fails,”

searchmobilecoputing.techtarget.com, accessed March 14, 2017; Cordelia Kroob, “The Growth of an Enterprise Social Network at BASF,” www.simply-

communicate.com, accessed March 12, 2017; Insight Enterprises Inc., “Collaboration Technology Boosts Organizations, According to an Insight-Sponsored Report by

Harvard Business Review Analytic Services,” February 13, 2017; Dimension Data, “2016 Connected Enterprise Report,” 2016; Gerald C. Kane, “Enterprise Social

Media: Current Capabilities and Future Possibilities,” MIS Quarterly Executive, March 2015; and Dion Hinchcliffe, “In Europe’s Biggest Firms, Social Business Is All

Grown Up,” Enterprise Web 2.0, February 12, 2015.

Case Study Questions

MyLab MIS

Go to the Assignments section of MyLab MIS to complete these writing exercises.

2-13 Identify the people, organization, and technology factors responsible for impeding adoption of

internal corporate social networks. 2-14 Compare the experiences implementing internal social networks of the organizations described

in this case. Why were some successful? What role did management play in this process? 2-15 Should all companies implement internal enterprise social networks? Why or why not?

2-16 Identify and describe the capabilities of enterprise social networking software. 2-17 Describe the systems various management groups use within the firm in terms of the

information they use, their outputs, and groups served.

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