The Impact Of Social Media On Corporate Technology

The Fundamentals series continues this week with a look at how social media has impacted corporate IT. In this post, I’ll discuss:

• How social media technologies are different from traditional corporate IT technologies;
• How employees are also bringing social media into the enterprise; and
• What the complications are of bringing Web tools into the enterprise

Social media is represented by a wide range of technologies, such as blogs, social networks, and wikis. Contrary to the behemoth systems that most large companies have implemented over the last decade, such as ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, social media technologies are more compact, more nimble and less costly to implement.

However, the internal use of social tools—commonly dubbed as enterprise 2.0—aren’t necessarily there to replace the current systems. Instead, they can extend and enrich existing systems.

Using social media does require a different type of commitment. Whereas these former corporate technologies were used for tasks like reporting, transaction recording and/or information processing, social media technologies require a higher degree of involvement. Employees involved with social media initiatives have a continuous commitment to various tasks—depending on the social media technologies deployed—which may include (but are not limited to) creating content, listening in on consumer conversations, and engaging with the customer.

Employees are bringing social media into organizations in a bottom-up fashion. They are doing so because they are finding great benefits from using social media tools in their private lives and have a great familiarity with these tools.

It is up to organizations to take a stance toward this behavior, which can be one of three possibilities:

1. Encourage the behavior;
2. Discourage and ban the behavior; or
3. Do nothing

While options two and three appear the easiest, they’re not necessarily the best options.

A 2009 study by Social Media Today shows that organizations are recognizing the benefits social tools can offer within the organization. Behind marketing and PR, internal use of social tools for communication and collaboration is seen as the next most important use. The study also found that most companies encourage the use of social media rather than discourage it.

Obviously, there’s nothing wrong with enterprise 2.0—i.e. applying social tools within the organization—if that helps workers perform better, but top-down IT management is also good for ensuring consistency, compatibility and security. Organizations will need to strike a balance in finding the best way to go about infrastructure, architecture, applications and data.

The corporate IT environment is a complex eco-system that has many nodes, layers, silos, connections and barriers. The Web, on the other hand, is a single platform where openness is more dominant and much information can be found with few search queries. This is the most pressing issue. Corporate data cannot have the same open structure as Web data because it’s unique, proprietary and private.

To get the best of both worlds, the enterprise architecture will need to resemble the Web’s structure, but without compromising the security and governance measures in place.

We’ll revisit enterprise 2.0 later on but for now, it should be clear that social tools bring internal benefits to organizations in terms of improving processes and usability. Organizations have important decisions to make in regards to the future of their corporate IT infrastructure.

As always, your thoughts are welcome.