Adoption in the Organisation
Jinfo Blog

By Melanie Browne

Abstract

Melanie Browne reviews the articles which make up the FreePint Report: Adoption in the Organisation and highlights some of the strands. User-created content brings challenges for information professionals and nudges the evolution of the role towards that of facilitator or information guide. Mobiles and social media bring opportunities for using smarter tools and communicating more effectively, leading to better collaboration and more effective decision-making.

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Social media is an incredibly powerful way of driving faster access to information and in return it drives collaboration. When organisations adopt social or information sharing tools the results can be quite fruitful. Outcomes can include faster and better decision making that can help drive new product innovation, higher sales, improved customer service, and streamlined processes. 

In his article on the changing role of the information professional, Scott Brown discusses how, increasingly, the general population is the mass producer of content. Our role as information professionals is moving more towards managing this content. User-generated content has expanded to include not just documents but blog spots, comments, tweets and other forms of shared information. Now, with anyone being able to create, manage and post content, the role of the information professional has to evolve to address these changes. The information professional's role is no longer that of the gatekeeper of information but is moving towards being an information guide.

In her article Penny Crossland also examines evolving roles and describes the librarian of the future as an aggregator, evaluator and facilitator of information. The role of the information professional has moved from being guardian of physical items to evaluator of and guide to digital content.

Ready or not, the mobile revolution is upon us. According to the Symantec survey, 59% of respondents said their companies are now making business applications accessible to mobile devices. 71% of businesses surveyed are looking into implementing a corporate "app store". Not only are they creating and/or providing the apps that are helpful tools for their employees, but they are making them easily accessible.

The corporate “app store” is a place where employees can go and get the apps that they need. It also provides a way for the company and IT to gain control over apps and ensure that they comply with corporate policy. Expanding the way that people use apps is an efficient way to streamline business. People are already using apps for social purposes; it is a small leap then for them to implement them into their corporate processes.

How do we know if our organisation is ready for social media? Robin Neidorf offers us some guidelines on what mobility readiness looks like in an organisation. Scott Brown, in his article, made the analogy of users “snacking” on information using their phones. This he refers to as the mobile revolution, where snacking is taking small bites of information from a variety of sites. This is a particularly effective way to disseminate information in a busy professional environment.

Motivation for the integration of social and business applications is often to drive better decision-making through collaboration and businesses are starting to see the potential benefits of encouraging employees to use these applications for work purposes. Social applications are also slowly being implemented in corporate environments in an effort to link existing business processes to collective intelligence, with the end goal being to drive better results. 

Connie Crosby takes us on an engaging tour of some of the tools that are being used by organisations today to improve collaboration. Her survey of tools discusses some of the big players in the enterprise software arena which offer the full range of functionality in online collaboration. Connie also discusses innovation systems and how they provide a way to gather feedback and ideas for possible implemention, bringing the trendy concept of “crowdsourcing” back to the enterprise.

The role of the information professional is ever-changing and evolving. Collaboration through social media apps is key to driving better business results. Hence we're undoubtedly going to see more social media apps tailored for businesses.

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