Deloitte Report on Social SW in Business

Deloitte has released an interesting report on the ongoing effort to discover how social SW can create real value in an enterprise.

It's a helpful reminder that social SW in business requires much more than "build it and they will come", since a business's stakeholder community has neither the size nor the scope of the Internet.

And, it emphasizes the need to focus on outputs (eg, value-added) instead of inputs (eg, adoption rates).

There are several challenges discussed:

1. Employees must gain some basic familiarity with the tool. While some Internet-based knowledge will transfer, business-specific tools will have their own learning curve, even if they're based on common open source SW.

2. Employees must discover how the tool can help them do their job better. There's no recipe for this, and I suspect that existing roles & processes will have to remain largely intact during the initial adoption phase. One employee at Alcoa is quoted as saying "One day it just clicked for me. ... That's when I started seeing Traction help me do my job better."

3. There's a bit of an ontological mismatch between the formal teleological structures of a workplace (processes, roles, organizations, etc) and the unstructured (mostly) telos-free landscape of social SW. A "deer in the headlights" response is entirely appropriate. Add in employee workload and a relative low level of employee engagement, and you're looking at a daunting task to (a) find potential high-value, low-cost bridges between "as-is" and "to-be", and (b) build critical mass once promising bridges are identified. This mismatch seems to grow exponentially as the size & bureaucracy of the business grows.

None of this is Simple or Complicated; it's definitely "managing the emergence of beneficial coherence within attractors within boundaries" (Snowden).

Deloitte asserts that the need for these tools is becoming critical as work is increasingly characterized by activities with significant Complex (exploratory) aspects (page 7).

Figure 3 lists five "unique" capabilities of social SW:
1. Identify expertise
2. Facilitate cross-boundary communication & conversation
3. Preserve institutional memory
4. Harness distributed knowledge
5. Discover emerging opportunities

Unfortunately, there seems to be little, if any, awareness that these tools are unlikely to be used effectively for these purposes unless there's good social connectivity across the business. There's a "chicken-egg" problem here that folks like Dave Snowden have addressed with such activities as Social Network Stimulation. I'm not sure I see much awareness in this report of how critical this issue is.

The discussion of metrics (pp. 9-11) made me slightly uneasy (eg. "Recipe for Success"); an understanding that there's a risk that a metric will become a goal (thereby ceasing to be a metric) seems to be missing. A boundaries/attractors approach would seem to be more effective; maybe this was done for the OSIsoft example, but if so, it's not clear. It seems more of a "build it and they will come", though that may just be retrospective coherence.

Figure 10, a "Social software capability and tool heatmap", may be the most interesting part of the report. My initial reaction was that the ratings (eg, a Prediction Market is rated as Low for "Preserve institutional memory") might be a bit simplistic, but they're still interesting. I suppose you could try to envision scenarios where a rating is completely wrong if you find the table offensive.

Bottom line: the overall approach feels more Complicated than Complex; I kept thinking that a sensemaking approach (eg, construction of a Cynefin map) would be much more effective in identifying and exploring how to best use social SW in a business context. Although there are hints that the authors understand this (pp. 16-17), I would have thought that they (John Hagel and John Seely Brown) would have spent more time discussing Complex needs and approaches.