Implementing "Social SharePoint" In Financial Services
Social computing has fundamentally changed the way people share and consume information—ultimately boosting productivity and innovation. Through the use of Microsoft SharePoint and social technologies, business conversations are now occurring in transparent work streams, enabling connections and dialogues to happen more expediently—and in some cases to occur under serendipitous circumstances that might never have occurred. But while breaking down information silos and dramatically increasing knowledge exchange—can you still maintain privacy, security and compliance?
Financial services organizations, especially, can't risk a security breach that could lead to litigation, fines, brand damage or worse. Top financial services institutions are realizing that any social computing experience must incorporate organizational change management, heed changing regulatory environments and protect critical business IP. Fortunately, the SharePoint platform is designed to simultaneously break down information silos and honor the necessary constraints. And integrating a social layer on top of SharePoint doesn't double your labor or your risk—instead you can leverage your existing investments made both in technology and governance.
To successfully implement and utilize an enterprise social computing solution while effectively mitigating the potential risks, consider the following three practices:
1. Get everyone on the same page. Change is tough. One of the best ways to mitigate the fear of change is to start with the familiar. For non-millennial generation workers who haven't experienced social networking yet, social tools can cause fear of the unknown. Choose social business software that integrates with your existing email, mobile and document management platforms. This way, you can ease transition concerns while helping your employees work faster and smarter right out of the gate.
One business unit cannot manage these issues in a vacuum; every line of business must work together to create and enforce sustainable social computing and collaboration policies throughout the organization-it should be a part of your organizational DNA. From the outset, employees should sign off on corporate policies that specify what is and is not acceptable behavior. For instance, you don't want your employees sharing confidential information. But you do want your employees to collaborate. Creating and enforcing social-related policies to educate your workforce leads to adoption. And that leads to business results.
2. Heed the requirements of regulatory bodies. Governing bodies like FINRA and the SEC in the financial services industry require in-depth records management of all forms of communication, including instant messaging and microblog posts. Social computing solutions afford you the transparency you need—allowing you to capture, store, archive, report and access every piece of content that travels through the aggregated activity stream—even data from disparate technology systems like your CRM system, Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Lync. And since your social layer is built into SharePoint, a technology platform that already enables compliance, you've won a good portion of the audit battle already.
When you integrate SharePoint with a social computing solution, you can protect your intellectual property by restricting user access based on an array of criteria, including role, department and security clearance. These tools allow you to enable and disable features according to the same criteria. This is the kind of fine-grained access control that will give you comfort.
For data security concerns, you don't have to start from scratch. As mentioned, SharePoint does provide a foundation for risk management and data security. You can add a social layer that is deeply integrated with SharePoint (via NewsGator Social Sites). You can centralize profiles, authentication and security capabilities—keeping your confidential employee and client information safely behind your firewall. And you can leverage out of the box requirements for records management and e-discovery.
3. Enable and control knowledge exchange. The trick for financial services companies is to create a compliant and confidential environment in which employees can freely share the information they're authorized to share—and an environment in which companies are confident letting them.
Community leaders and workflow technologies can monitor approvals, access and distribution of content before that information is used to solve real problems and make complex business decisions. Social computing solutions allow this sanctioned content to be surfaced, approved and appropriately shared within the company.
With these steps, implementing an enterprise social computing solution on top of SharePoint shouldn't make you cringe. The reality is that online collaboration—including social computing—has become a part of the blueprint of the business world, and it should be an integral part of your company if it isn't already.
By applying these best practices and some common sense, your organization can reap the benefits of a fully integrated social SharePoint platform. When you take away the guesswork for your employees and provide them with guidelines and policies to follow, you effectively minimize the potentially damaging effects of social computing—and ultimately create a secure, open and productive collaboration environment.
As a Microsoft Gold Certified and Depth Managed Partner, NewsGator delivers robust social technology to the enterprise with proven scalability and security. Microsoft honored them as its 2011 US Partner of the Year. Follow them @newsgator! For additional information, please visit www.newsgator.com.