OK, that's a bizarre title for a blog post.
What's the intepretation?
Simple: IT and HR working together could be a great approach for social media proficiency in larger enterprises.
Hold that cynicism for just a moment while I explain.
The Problem
During the course of this journey, I have met dozens of people who are starting to tackle the big challenge of making their enterprises proficient at using social software.
Invariably, they are IT people.
I do not mean this in a negative way. They "get" what this stuff is all about, and they've decided to take it upon themselves to do the right thing. They are bright, passionate, insightful people.
But they're essentially doing it alone. And that creates problems getting to the ultimate prize.
As an example, if they've rolled something out, it's usually to other IT people, or to a small part of the business. It's not the broad-based initiative they'd really like.
As a result, funding can be a problem. It's hard to get people to step up and quantify business value.
Ideally, IT would have a business partner in this journey.
Think For A Moment
In your business, how many projects that were solely sponsored by IT brought significant business value?
Maybe there's a few, but I'd offer that the majority of golly-gee-whiz IT projects usually had one or more business sponsors. IT, working with the business, can deliver amazing results.
When IT is working along -- without business sponsorship -- the odds get a little longer, IMHO.
Ideally, social media proficiency would be a sponsored "cause" by one or more business units. Certainly, there's no reason why not, right?
But that brings up the question -- who (other than IT) can sponsor an internal social media initiative?
Danger, Over-Generalization Ahead!
I actually gave this some significant thought about a year ago. Turns out that many of my initial suspicions turned out to be accurate.
One candidate was marketing. The good news: marketing people get this stuff, and they have budget to spend. The bad news: something created for marketing is likely to be primarily used by marketing.
As an example, one of my roles here is to be a marketing guy from time to time. When I became the driver behind this initiative, there were many who wrote it all off as a "marketing thing", and they didn't mean it in a nice, positive way.
Not only that, but marketing people want to immediately jump to external communities, and have shown to be a bit impatient to wait a year to establish internal proficiency first, like we're doing.
What about sales organizations? Surely they could benefit from a wide open conversation about all sorts of topics? Well, in our company, the sales culture could be ardent consumers of the conversations, but they tend to be a bit non-participatory in many discussions. There's also a natural command-and-control heirarchy that comesalong with many sales cultures, including ours.
More importantly, sales management tends to invest in things that drive more sales. And I thought it was a bit of a stretch to create a direct, causal link between social productivity software and sales revenue increases.
How about the product guys? That was quite a candidate for a while. Engineering and support organizations love to collaborate, and are eager adopters of new things, generally speaking. But as we probed around, we realized that they wanted a very structured collaboration environment, with fairly tight controls around who could see what, who could edit what, and so on. Not really what I was looking for.
Remember, I was looking for the Big Conversation, the one around passionate topics that spans organizational silos. That meant that -- ideally -- I needed business sponsorship outside of traditional corporate silos.
And then I started thinking about our HR team.
HR? Are You Serious?
Yes.
Your situation may be different, but at EMC, I think we've got a world-class HR organization.
They develop and manage most of the classes and curricula EMCers must take.
They tackle tough organizational issues like globalization, diversity and inclusion.
They've tuaght us about matrix management, and new leadership styles.
They are passionate about culture and change.
And they're always looking for the next "win" they can bring EMC.
Enterprise 2.0 is right in their wheelhouse, so to speak.
Not only that, there's enough business justification in the HR domain to justify the investment. Consider, if you will, improved employee satisfaction and retention. Or the ability to spot and develop talent in new ways.
Perhaps enhancing how we train and develop our employees using social media techniques. Or even making new employees more productive.
These are things our company spends tens of millions of dollars on today, maybe more. By comparison to other IT investments that HR has made over the years, a nice social media platform and a few people to help out looks like comparatively small change.
Not only that, but -- early on in this journey -- they "got" it. They weren't quite sure what to do about it, but they knew that there was something wonderfully powerful and transformational with this whole 2.0 thing, and they wanted to do it for EMC.
I've basically asked them to do two things.
First, I want them to become proficient users of the platform. They're doing that. It's taking a bit longer than I would have originally thought, but it's happening.
Second, I want them to lead the charge across EMC for "Enterprise 2.0 Proficiency". Not how to use a wiki (although there's some of that), but -- more importantly -- how E2.0 changes everything, including how we work, how we manage, cultural values around honesty and transparency, inclusion, etc.
Consider Some Other Aspects
Typically, HR isn't aligned with one corporate faction or another -- they're a shared corporate service, available to all. That's a nice position in the organization for this kind of stuff, I believe.
If your group is structured like ours in, there's not only the traditional centralized functions, but HR specialists who are aligned to each business unit -- a useful structure when you're looking at behavioral change and adoption.
They're very comfortable with "soft" justifications. Maybe too comfortable, but that's a different discussion.
And, not surprisingly, a lot of justification around social productivity software is "soft".
And then there's the big one ...
Enterprise 2.0 isn't about technology, it's really about people: how they think, how they behave, how they collaborate, how they lead.
And, if you look at the problem that way, who better to collaborate with than your HR team?
As you said, it definitely clarifies the objective of such an effort -- getting people to work together in more efficient ways and creating an environment that people want to work in. Our HR has a long standing initiative for making the new graduates/new employees not feel lost in a big machine and lose spirit and drive. When you think that these new graduates have already spent some time with social tools then working in this area seems "right".
John Prichard
[email protected]
Texas Instruments
Posted by: John Prichard | March 25, 2008 at 04:24 PM
Chuck,
Great post, and I'd like to reinforce your point. I'm currently working on a social media initiative within EMC and have hit a roadblock. All of a sudden it occurred to me to pull HR into the situation, so I sat down for 10 minutes with my HR rep, and bam, things are starting to happen. I wasn't really sure why HR and SM make sense, but after reading your post things got a little clearer.
Steve
Posted by: Steve Todd | March 26, 2008 at 09:16 AM