Social intranets struggle forward, social business processes
don’t. Those overhauling their intranets to make them more social have
had a long, hard time of it. To be clear, this is not because social intranets
aren’t useful, but coordinating (and sometimes fighting) the IT department,
corporate communications, HR, and often competing vendor camps inside the
company means that many firms aren’t as far along as they should be. SharePoint
has often slowed down the move to more social tools for big companies in
particular. Industry regulation, privacy laws, and other issues for many firms
have made
internal social media difficult to adopt widely. Combined together, the drag
has been surprisingly high for Enterprise 2.0. That said, Toby Ward has reported
the highest penetration of social features on corporate intranets yet, with
61% of all
companies reporting at least one social media tool
in place this year.
This has led to an
increasing attention on a subject that adds a new dimension to the discussion:
Integrating social media more directly into business processes. This discussion
was sparked by
Laurie Buczek this year and was discussed widely by the Enterprise 2.0
community, with a growing consensus that while general purpose, open-ended
social media was the right direction (and is vital
for emergent outcomes), a more direct route to value capture is also needed.
It’s now increasingly believed that high impact results will come most directly
from integrating social business into daily work processes on the ground. Expect
much more practitioner focus on this in 2012. For more details, read
