There’s Life (and Business Value) after Email – Lessons from TAG Social Business

By Paul Miller, Product Manager: End User Computing and Collaboration, McKesson Corporation
 

New collaboration technologies are encroaching on our once stable world of Email.   Do tools that enable people to connect and share like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+ represent threats to our enterprises or can they accelerate business performance?    Where do you start?

The TAG Social Business Society hosted a CIO panel (Accelerating Business Performance with Enterprise Collaboration) to move beyond the abstract, to discuss concrete examples of real enterprises putting real solutions into action.    The panelists represented a variety of industries – a credit card processor, an industry trade association, an Internet commodity trading platform, and a healthcare services company and the key message was the same.  Business is still business – tools are still just tools.  The new types of collaboration technologies can yield business value to your enterprise NOW IF viewed through the lens of the “New World of Work”, where work is an activity, not a place, and connecting people in new, interesting ways can deliver new sources of value to the business, and relevance for IT.

As IT Product Manager for McKesson responsible for the tools and technologies that employees use to do their work, I was delighted to have the opportunity to moderate this panel.   We’ve made strategic investments in moving beyond Email – enterprise IM, SharePoint, web conferencing, TelePresence – achieving meaningful adoption and enriching our employees’ experience of working at McKesson.  But we feel like we’re only scratching the surface. Practical knowledge in ‘going social’ that can be applied today is going to come from our peers’ real-world experiences – the successes and the failures - not vendor hype and analysts’ abstract models.   That’s why we decided to become an active sponsor with TAG Social Business.

A very active discussion yielded a number of nuggets for the audience:

1) Adapt ‘social’ to the business needs and culture of your organization.   Examples included:
• Using Facebook to transform an IT organization into being more outward-facing and customer-centric
• Using low-cost video conferencing to establish more ‘connectedness’ and community to recently acquired remote facilities • Creating an online marketplace of ideas (crowdsourcing), to tap into latent innovation within the enterprise
• Encouraging new employees to post to the “Welcome Blog” to inculcate a culture of technology leadership critical to the company’s success in the newest members of the organization

2) The proxy for ROI is meaningful adoption.  

These kind of initiatives are tough to justify in advance; each of our panelists essentially suggested that they were able to introduce them because of their own personal standing in the organization.  When programs ‘hit’ and are used, keep them; when they ‘miss’, move onto something else.  The investment required for these programs is typically modest, so the cost of ‘failure’ is low.   However, the opportunity costs of doing nothing can be very high. 

3) ‘Social’ is best introduced as an adjunct to an existing business process – NOT as a separate, standalone activity.

‘Social’ is just another business tool to support key business processes.  ‘Going social’ is best deployed by amplifying the impact or streamlining the effectiveness of an existing process.    • Extending the web-based engagement with hospitals to include interactive features
• Adding video to virtual meetings with remote facilities
• Extending the corporate Intranet already in place with a new branded ‘idea marketplace’.
• Presenting additional options to engage on the customers’ existing user interface

4) The next generation of the workforce views social networking as their “native” communication style

“Millennials” require this collaboration platform and it is becoming mandatory in order to retain the most qualified resources.  They leverage these technologies and platforms in their everyday life and “bring it with them” to the office.

More broadly, the consumerization of IT in which users buy and leverage their own equipment within the company environment is changing the model from IT delivering all the tools people use to IT adapting the tools people are already using to the company purposes.

5) Social media/collaboration exhibits both “transformational” and “evolutionary” characteristics. 

The best social initiatives will be ‘evolutionary’ to the end user experience – so people can readily adapt to them – but ‘transformative’ in their impacts, because they introduce new dynamics of collaborative work. 

Special thanks to all our panelists.  

• Jay Ferro, SVP, CIO - AdCare Health Systems
• Edwin Marcial, CTO - InterContinental Exchange
• Chris Kenyon, CIO – Elavon • Andy Goodwin, CIO - Georgia Hospital Association