Social Media in the Enterprise @ Cass Business School

On Tuesday night David Terrar and I ran the first Social media in Enterprise session (#smie on Twitter), as part of London's Social media Week (and Benjamin Ellis took some pictures). We only thought of doing it a week before, in fact one of the lessons of Social media is that it was very easy to organise the event - though one of the social technologies used was email, which many "social" purists think of anathema . Its interesting to look at that in fact - Twitter DMs and email were the main "back end" tools used to organise and co-ordinate, Twitter and blogs were the main tools used to publicise, and a cloud based app - Eventbrite - was used to take tickets and Paypal used to collect payment. All this was set up in about 48 hours, part time (Kudos to Cass Business School for stepping up to the plate). You have to stop and think about how easy it would have been to do that even 5 years ago.

We used the Patchwork Elephant to symbolise how the area was still confused, we are like blind men feeling our way around the elephant and by looking at various viewpoints we may see it completely. But its also a patchwork, in that tere are many types of Enterprises - not for profit vs for profit, physical vs digital, manufacturing vs service etc etc.

Anyway, on to the show - the speakers ran in alphabetical order, but I'm going to re-organise it in sequence of big picture to detailed actions (David has a good summary of teh speakers and their organisations over here on his take of the evening).

Umair Haque talked about "Peak Organisations" - in a fascinating talk, he outlined his thesis that organisations designed on 18th century principles are just not fit for purpose today, and that hierarchies built to organise masses of people to perform the same menial tasks do not work when the key issue is to maximise knowledge work. He went through some of the new principles of organisation design that will maximise value.

Benjamin Ellis took this point to the next level of detail, looking at the differences between corporate hierarchy networks, the "real" networks that make things work (his slides are over here). He then mapped this to how a social media network works and what the likely organisational impacts will be - and where the fault lines are. Now people have been writing about "hollowed out" organisations for years, and Social media gurus have long noted that its structure is more sympathetic to knowledge work - but Benjamin is one of the few I''ve seen pointing out that an in-enterprise social network is very different to a friendship one and has all sorts of "plumbing" issues to work through. (a point later picked up by Mat when he noted two different types of capital - social and financial - existed uncomfortable together. Render unto Caesar....! Adriana and Euan picked up on this in other ways too).

Mat Morrison then took this to another level of detail again, showing work he had done on the actual social networks in real organisations. One of teh fascinating lessons was that a social network left to grow "au naturel" in an organisation is patchy and has a few massive nodes, who cause mass failure if taken out. He showed that a certain amount of design is necessary, as well as "automatic implementation" onto desktops to ensure both that everyone was networked and the resilience was acceptable.

My talk was on the challenges Social Media faces to convince people of its overall Return on Investment, I looked at the potential role of Social Media in 3 key areas of value creation (slides are here):

- Innovation
- Operational Excellence - Sales, Operating costs, etc etc
- Agility - the ability to react quickly to changes in a marketplace, and deal with disruption.

In essence this was a discussion on the business economics of SM, and where the biggest levers may be found, It is dependent on the company - for example SM seems quite useful to handle churn, great if you are in a high churn industry, but if you are a low churn industry its not a great benefit.

Adriana Lukas looked at her experience of implementing social media in large corporates (see her slides here), and drew some conclusions about how to do it effectively. Her view reflected the theme that Benjamin and Umair had already floated about traditional hierarchies being orthogonal to social media structures. She pointed out that even the social media structure in an enterprise looks different. Her main hypothesis is that it is not going to be possible to re-engineer today's organisation to use social media - you have to build them this way from the ground up. to build stuff in businesses you have to have small pilots, below the radar, so you can prove it.

Euan Semple talked without notes (he came on towards the end of the event and I think talking powerpointless was very high impact at that time) about his 10 years of experience of working with social media tools in organisations. His basic point, like Adriana's, was that the way social media works is orthogonal to the way rigid heirarchies work. He then noted that Social Media does actually map quite closely to the way people like to work. He also showed that there is no inevitable move towards Social Media , looking at the Burtian Era in the BBC as an example (John Burt tried to impose a Tory style internal market plus industrial grade hierarchy to a creative public service)

What I took away from this and Adriana's talk is that it may be possible to re-engineer some businesses, similar to the way you had to re-engineer to use JIT techniques - but it is very hard, and JIT only took off in this way because some companies like Toyota had spent decades changing to operate that way, and were now whipping competitive asses.

Sue Black talked case study - how she utilised Social Media for a Not for profit Enterprise - Bletchley Park (where the German codes were broken in World War 2) has been left in a shabby state (the UK does not love its technology heroes much - poor old Frank Whittle, who invented the jet engine, was only remembered by an Industrial Estate named after him for decades). What she described was a masterful use of social media - at very low cost - to mobilise people to help. What really struck me was that Sue didn't pretend she had a perfect strategy, but in fact had to try many different things in the process, some worked, some didn't. A reminder that this is experimental stuff.

Dave Terrar then gave a number of case studies from companies doing things today - Swiss Re, Cisco amd Wachovia, noting that what is now needed is to aggregate an emerging body of knowledge about what works and what doesn't. His key point was that this may move like the ERP market in future:

Although a lot of my social media colleagues favour a bottom up, disruptive or even "skunk works" approach to implementation, which can all work… the old rules of project implementation still apply inside the culture of many, or even most, businesses. Swiss Re is a perfect example of how you get senior executive buy in and sponsorship to ensure success, and then spread the word to 11,500 employees. It was the way we used to get a successful ERP implementation going, and it can be done for the change management required for implementing these sorts of collaboration tools too. One of my key messages is that these tools need to work with, enhance and improve the existing business processes, not go around or subvert them.

I think what we are seeing here is two phases in the evolution of a system (Dave puts Enterprise 2.0 in The Chasm right now) - before ERP there was MRP, and in its early days it was skunkworked, then when it was shown to work it got taken up by a few go ahead companies, whose success drove others to emulate it.

Shefaly Yogendra and Will McInness couldn't make it unfortunately, but have put up thir contributions online here and here. Well worth the read, Shefaly dealing with highly regulated industries and Will taking up the theme of it being inevitable as it works as we do. (I will link to people's stuff as they paste it up)

In the Q&A and discussions afterwards there were quite a few interesting threads around what the endgame will look like - Ronald Coase's work on sizes of firms being driven by transaction costs, abiut Dunbar and the optimal size of hierarchies, about the industrial era organisation of current enterprises vs the organic structure of social media (a few old salts noted the smallest unit in a Just In Time organisation is a self reliant "cell" - a thread I want to push further in future). But one has to come back to a corollary of Umair's thesis - before we see major changes there needs to be a structural change in the way capital is accumulated (the rich get richer regardless) and distributed (small, nimble companies find it far harder to get money than large, sclerotic ones) whereas most of the innovation and value is being created outside of these existing systems.

To end - an observation by Patrick Hadfield:

To change the culture and behaviour in organisations, we need to look at all aspects of working – including the processes and the reward structure. If we don’t tackle these aspects of organisation life, we will have little success: people will work to the outcome they are rewarded for and by which they are managed.

The move to flatter, less hierarchical organisations – even, perhaps, the fabled “virtual” organisations where almost all aspects of business are outsourced – may be the most fertile ground for social media in enterprises: they can be nimble, and they rely on effective communication to function properly. Here, use of social media could provide a real business advantage – and maybe this is where the real value of social media in business will be found.

Afterthought - on reading this, I know a number of people will say "we've heard this before". To them I'd say, you are right - but you have also heard a lot of other stuff, a lot of which is total snake oil, that was NOT said. This is the considered view of a bunch of smart people who have been looking at this for a long time, long before there was a bandwagon to jump on. I'm not saying this is canonical, but i can see the glimmerings of an elephant taking shape. More later, as they say.

A Patchwork Elephant a bit better described, then. There does seem to a considerable feeling to do another one, and there were at least 8 people in the audience who could as easily have been speaking, so I think this may, like our elephant, have legs