Enterprise social requires governance
Jinfo Blog

By Joanna Ptolomey

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In the old days we called it the company intranet. Now, it is the social enterprise collaborator workspace. That is according to Matt Hamilton of the Plone Foundation and his seminar presentation at Online Information 2011.

Matt’s case study is taken from his long relationship with global household brand Belron, the world’s largest vehicle glass repair business. In the UK you will know this company as Autoglass.

So what happens in an enterprise social collaborative workspace? Some usual old school intranet practices such as forums, but essentially most of the action centres around social media type features such as Twitter type updates and blog.

Matt reminds us that social media inside the enterprise works the same as outside. There will be creators, critics, conversationalists, joiners, collectors, spectators and inactives. But why do people in enterprises want to share?

From an enterprise point of view the hope is that it strengthens bonds and defines collective identity. But what is in for employees – gaining status? Or perhaps something less tangible – perhaps being known as a knowledge or people connector, a problem solver or for thinking outside the box?

What was apparent from Matt's experience was that he had been on the intranet journey with Belron for a number of years. He had seen ideas, processes and content come and go. However the essential driver for success was good governance.

Leading by example, top down, was the key driver of the Belron social enterprise workspace success. That means senior executives being supportive, visible, present and active on the workspace. Behind that top down approach there needs to be support, visibility and input across the organisation from teams such as new media, site/content, intranets communications, steering team and executive team.

Success does not happen overnight and it was obvious that Matt and Belron had had a long relationship together. They had grown up with vendor and enterprise seemingly fitting well together. Their relationship also allowed for a certain amount of pragmatism in measuring success.

Success is often complex to measure but good governance can help in defining what this means. Matt offers some simple success metrics with before and after snapshots. Make things faster, have bad things decreased, assess page ratings, gather comments for useful feedback and obviously some cost savings (time/distribution/other software/travel).   

Whatever it is called – intranet or social enterprise collaborator workspace – good governance is essential for long term success, for product vendors to deliver upon and for enterprises to identify what they need, how to manage it and how to measure the effect/success of the endeavour. 

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