By 2016, 50% of large organisations will have internal Facebook-like social networks, and 30% of these will be considered as essential as email and telephones are today, says information technology research and advisory company, Gartner Inc.
“The popularity and effectiveness of social networking sites as a group communication tool among customers is prompting organisations as well as individual employees to ask whether similar technologies can be deployed privately,” Nikos Drakos, research director at Gartner, said in a release on Tuesday.
“There is increasing interest for using social technologies within organisations to connect people more effectively, to capture and reuse valuable informal knowledge, and to deliver relevant information more intelligently where it is needed through social filtering,” he said.
According to Gartner, using Facebook-like enterprise social networking software for communication has several advantages over email and traditional check-in/check-out repository-centric collaboration in terms of information capture and reuse, group organisation, and social filtering.
A Facebook-like social networking environment within an organisation can be used as a general-purpose communication channel where information and events that originate in external systems–such as email, office applications and business applications–can be injected into conversations, and vice versa.
Gartner estimates that through 2015, 80% of social business efforts will not achieve the intended benefits due to inadequate leadership and an overemphasis on technology.
“Businesses need to realise that social initiatives are different from previous technology deployments. Traditional technology rollouts, such as ERP (enterprise resource planning) or CRM (customer relationship management), followed a ‘push’ paradigm. Workers were trained on an app and were then expected to use it. In contrast, social initiatives require 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, they must opt-in,” said Carol Rozwell, vice-president and analyst at Gartner.
This, according to Gartner, means that the leaders of social business initiatives need to shift their emphasis away from deciding which technology to implement. Instead, they should focus on identifying how social initiatives will improve work practices for both individual contributors and managers. They need a detailed understanding of social networks: how people are currently working, who they work with and what their needs are.
“There is too much focus on content and technology, and not enough focus on leadership and relationships. Leaders need to develop a social business strategy that makes sense for the organisation and tackle the tough organizational change work head on and early on. Successful social business initiatives require leadership and behavioural changes. Just sponsoring a social project is not enough – managers need to demonstrate their commitment to a more open, transparent work style by their actions,” Rozwell said.
Outlining additional predictions around social and collaboration, Gartner said three key feature sets (social, mobile and gamification) were already emerging in the marketplace in user-facing applications, and that these features increased the attractiveness, usability and effectiveness of the applications they were found in.
Over the next five years, these three feature sets will continue to co-emerge and fuse into a superset, such that, by 2017, they will appear in the majority of user-oriented applications.
