In CIO this month, Rob Koplowitz, principal analyst at Forrester Research, sets out three clear stages for social media adoption:
Stage 1: Ensure that your organisation wants to adopt social. As with the introduction of any new technology, the smart organisation starts small. In the case of social technologies, there is no guarantee that your organisation will embrace them.
Carefully define the business issue you want to address and work closely with business leaders in a controlled pilot to ensure that your organisation will embrace social technologies. Do not underestimate the change management efforts to drive adoption. Change management should certainly include access to training materials, but far more important is that users have a strong understanding of the business goals and objectives regarding the initiative. Tightly coupled to this is strong business backing for the initiative.
• Stage 2: Define success, avoid risk. Stage 2 should build on the success of stage 1. Expand the use of social technologies to include more users and more business use cases. Look for business cases that reflect the lessons learned in stage 1, and engage appropriate business leaders to support the broad initiatives. During stage 2 it is important to determine policy and governance of the emerging social environment. Many organisations balk at wide-scale use of social technologies because of challenges related to security, privacy and compliance. These issues are generally manageable, and a well-governed social environment will lower risk because of transparency.
• Stage 3: Treat social like a true enterprise asset. As your organisation moves social technologies into enterprise wide deployment, be prepared to harden the implementation. By stage 3 a social environment should be capable of existing in a mission-critical environment. Operationally, your social applications should be highly available, integrated with corporate authentication systems, and deployed widely to drive critical mass of adoption. Integration with adjacent technologies, like line-of-business systems, should be part of stage 3 if this part of your long-term strategy – and technology selection should support those goals. Forward-thinking organisations that have moved toward broad deployment of social technologies are now in the process of building out strategies with core line-of-business systems like CRM, ERP, and others.
