Where sharing makes sense and where it doesn’t

2007 October 28
by Cornelius

Originally this was meant to be a response to my friend and personal muse Katherine Ferranti, but as it sometimes happens a brief email grew into something rather lengthy and bloggish and since I’ve neglected CorpBlawg far too long anyway, I decided to post here instead. Katherine pointed me to this piece on GigaOM about social productivity that is both a relatively low-key sales pitch for Jive Software’s Clearspace collaboration package and a general discussion of social software in organizational environments. The basis is an entry in Jive’s own blog that outlines what the company’s Sam Lawrence calls social productivity. Here’s a snippet:

Social Productivity is different [...] it’s about getting work done outside the team of like-minded people you work with everyday. With social productivity, an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in on it. These could be people you work with a lot, people you’ve never worked with or even people outside your company. Now all of a sudden your idea has been developed openly by all sorts of people who bring their own, valuable perspective. You can evolve those ideas into all sorts of collaborative or locked content but thanks to the social whetstone, your original idea is much stronger now. This isn’t just true “behind the firewall” within companies. Look at Wikipedia, the content has been built, written and organized more relevantly than any single or traditional team of authors could have done.

First of all - while I’m a huge fan of Wikipedia, it is objectively impossible to judge how relevant its content is and your judgment very much depends on several factors (What kind of information are you looking for? What article are you looking at? Are you looking for expert knowledge or just a brief introduction into a topic?). But let’s forget about Wikipedia for a moment and focus on social productivity.

With social productivity, an idea is introduced and all sorts of people get to chime in on it. These could be people you work with a lot, people you’ve never worked with or even people outside your company.

Wait - people outside of my company? What motive would they have to support a company project, assuming they aren’t getting paid for it? People outside my company don’t have any incentive to chime in - at least I have significant trouble imagining why they should want to.

The trouble is that the goal of a company isn’t to benefit a social network or community, it is to make money. This places severe limitations on social productivity, unless you assume that people enjoy working for free. With slight cynicism, one could contend that this is what the concept implies - let’s not be so uptight about who is paying whom, after all we’re all collaborating on everything anyway, right? Work is such a old-fashioned concept. Let’s just call everything collaboration and get people to give away their productivity for free and tada - there you have your ROI of social software.

I’m not implying that this is what Lawrence means. Clearspace is meant to make communication across departments and hierarchies easier and anyone who has ever worked for a large organization knows what a serious issue that is. But I think it’s important to note where the structure and purpose of a corporate entity are incompatible (or at least in conflict) with those of a social network and why the metaphor “let’s be just like Wikipedia” just doesn’t work.

Wikipedia exists for the sole purpose of creating a resource from which everyone will benefit in the same way, with the added perk that those who contribute are rewarded with social prestige among their peers. Some contributors are in it simply to improve the resource, others are in it because they feel rewarded by playing a role in the Wikipedia community. But in contrast to a company, people always work for some kind of personal gain, be it prestige or a feeling of achievement and they know that everyone else befits in the same way. Of course the employees of a company also work for personal gain, but for a monetary one and one that is built on the premise that not everyone benefits in the same way. In return for a salary and the perspective that I might increase some day they work for the good of the company - which should eventually translate into personal gain (more money). They accept hierarchical structures and persistent pressure to turn corporate goals into reality because there is a payoff. That isn’t a bad thing - it’s how organizations with paid employees work. And undoubtedly a large percentage of people loves their job and aren’t in it purely for the money. But it’s not the same way Wikipedia works, for obvious reasons.

Only after resolving the conflict between personal and organizational goals can the introduction of social soctware into the corporate world be successful. As long as employees feel that they have more to gain by competing than by collaborating they will do just that. Sharing makes sense when the playing field is perfectly level. Which it hardly is, out there in the corporate world.

from → Corporate Blogging, ROI of Blogging, Social Web

6 Comments
2007 October 29
Sam Lawrence permalink

Hi Cornelius,

Great blog post.

Wanted to offer a few follow up comments. Wikipedia is a good, iconic example of different people working collaboratively to create something faster and better than the way traditional dictionaries were created. It’s merely an example that everyone can relate to that can serve as a proxy for social productivity within an enterprise. Inside the enterprise, it could be the product development process, for example. Or training. Or an RFP.

As well, when we talk about involving potential stakeholders outside the company we mean vendors, consultants, or highly engaged customers. While it’s true these folks are not employees, they are stakeholders and each has incentive to add value to the process. So, I’d argue, they’re not helping “for free” as you mentioned, rather they are chiming in to help add value because of their stake and relevancy.

For example, last week I worked on a marketing strategy with folks in marketing, sales, professional services, our PR contractors, a consultant and an analyst. I plan to involve key customers for feedback, too. With social productivity, I can do this quickly, effectively and the outcome will be a much higher value then if done in a vacuum. Not to mention, ever individual who contributes will be associated with this project, so their value and reputation as individuals is recorded as well. Next time we are looking for expertise in this area, we’ll be able to quickly find those associated with this project.

Ultimately, social productivity will help capture the unstructured, collaborative content not currently captured within companies and their constituencies and aim those efforts at high-impact work processes. It’s a lot of what CRM did before it was a more mature industry. Sales went from content living all over the place to having a managed system. The same will be true for social productivity software in the enterprise.

Cheers,
Sam

Sam Lawrence
CMO, Jive Software

2007 October 30
Kim Feraday permalink

Cornelius,

There are cases where you would want to collaborate with people outside your own company. For example, my company might have a product that is complementary to mine and we want to bring a solution to market. From my own experience, I can tell you that would help us to identify how we package the joint offering, what markets we want to target, and even potentially to target specific customers.

These types of efforts typically require collaboration across geographies and time zones and it can be very difficult to get peoples time given that they have alot of competing interests (closing current pipeline opportunities, new product introductions, etc.). Having a set of tools to support these efforts would be invaluable.

There are also use cases inside a company as well. In a large company for example, you might want to launch an existing product in new vertical or geography. This would require resources that you don’t normally interact with and might not even know. In mature markets you might want to evaluate the opportunity to bundle existing products into a new offering — again this would require participation across groups that don’t normally collaborate and probably have alot of competing interests.

In all of these cases the underlying motivations are the typical ones — driving top line revenue, customer retention, increasing wallet share. But there is also a reputational aspect to this as well for employees. Being a contributor to a successful project that moves the company forward can increase personal prestige.

I think the real challenge this disucssion is on focussing on some key use cases and finding customers to partner with where these use cases resonate. ROI will fall out of this.

2007 October 30
Cornelius permalink

Thanks Kim and Sam for the insightful comments - you make some very valid points.

2007 October 31
Kim Feraday permalink

Sure. I was struggling to come up with some use cases but in thinking about it last night here’s a coupld of potential ones in healthcare.

1. Patient diaries to support clinical trials (Pharmacuetical companies).
2. Disease managment programs. Again keeping patient diaries (possibly as part of an PHR). This might be accessible by Payor case managers/nurse practioners, the patients doctor, maybe the pharmacist and others. In addition each of those might blog to a limited audience to provide advice as required.
3. Payor product development — particularly with newer products like HSAs a payor might white label financial products from banks, insurers, etc. This type of product devleopment would require collaboration across organizational boundaries etc.

2007 November 1
Cornelius permalink

Those are interesting examples, Kim. I think an important question is what avenues of communication with external stakeholders benefit the most from complete transparency. Medical information is certainly among them, though I think there are instances where pharma companies and patients would rather not have their information discussed out in the open. But generally there are more instances of insufficient communication (people “outside” are not involved where they could be) than vice versa and changing that would certainly have a lot of merit.

2007 November 1
Kim Feraday permalink

Sure but with clinical trials you would be recruited, either through your doctor or previous contact. Obviously, for this and PHR examples, you’d have to have pretty granular security on who gets access to what.

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