Social Business: Delivering the Promise of KM?

"When those kinds of applications are addressed with social, people start living in the solution because they're getting work done," says Tim.

I had been under the impression that social was being mainly applied to the "softer" parts of the business—marketing, communications, customer care, etc. But Tim strongly insists that the hard science of product development, R&D, engineering are benefiting as well. Granted, it is more prevalent in high-tech kinds of businesses, but the trend is clear, he tells me.

"One of the areas it's really good for is not just R&D in product development, that is already part of the plan, but also in innovation," he says. "For example, T-Mobile first deployed social technology (Jive's, of course!), and they used it to coordinate among the various teams that were developing smartphones. And it was mainly applied to coordinating the development planning among those teams." But then they rolled it out further, he says. "Now they are using it to share ideas and to find experts with specialized knowledge to create new products, better. They use it as a place to share ideas that people come up with, as well as a place to start new ones."

I started this conversation as a way to connect the dots between social and knowledge management, and I think I'm starting to get there. But—me being me—I'm always skeptical when people talk about "collaborating among departments." I think that the functional departments are divided quite naturally by their immediate goals and interests. For example, business wants to keep everything, just in case; IT want to get rid of everything, because it costs them a lot; legal want to manage and maintain governance over information, to keep their you-know-whats out of the sling. And I can't imagine them all getting in a room and agreeing on... anything.

"This is exactly where I think the value of these various use patterns comes into play," says Tim. "I think, in part, you're right. They are probably thinking ‘we're in legal; what do we care about what marketing is doing?' But I believe these cross-functional use cases is where the real value appears. One example is sales enablement. That usually means there's one team providing sales opportunities (leads), a marketing group providing collateral, another group providing competitive intelligence to the central sales team. It just makes sense for those marketing and sales teams to work together." True enough.

"A different use case is deal management," Tim describes. Just so you know, this is where a sales team uses social tools to more effectively execute a deal. Why is that necessary? "We have one customer, a huge technology provider, who had 260 people, around the world, working on one account. This spans global account managers, regional account managers, naturally, but it also spans people outside of sales, such as those who are working on ‘proof of concept' information, and statements of work, and terms and conditions agreements, people in finance helping to structure the deal(s)... So deal management recognizes that there are important reasons to bring people from different departments to work toward a common purpose." OK, I'm convinced.

Who's In Charge?

I wondered, as I often do: who's in charge? To what degree is this an IT discussion? Seems to me that the business side also needs to have a seat at the table in order to make the strategic aspects work. Who would you say leads the social business "bandwagon?" Business or IT? And if your answer is "both of the above," do you see actual cooperation between those organizations?

"A couple years ago there was definitely more of a spilt between the lines of business and IT. And we also found that the decision would come primarily out of one group or the other. IT would say ‘Here's the decision. Let's go.' Or, line-of-business would say, ‘this is the way of the future. Let's go,'" answers Tim.

"But now, pretty much every time, IT is involved. It's become mission-critical and touches every employee." And thus, it's a structural decision that needs an infrastructure to support it.

"But, having said that," adds Tim. "there IS one business group that seems to have a strong say. And that's corporate communications." Huh? "It's because they're struggling to figure out a better way to communicate with ALL their employees and make sure everyone is strategically aligned. And all the corporate information—from HR and from the top down—gets disseminated. So social makes sense as a platform for that. I've heard plenty of anecdotal evidence that it is true."

On a more or less personal side note, this is exactly why knowledge management was so attractive to us, at KMWorld, all those years ago. And also why it has been so impossible. Tim is right; there are terrific examples of use cases where knowledge sharing is a prerequisite for the task. But unfortunately, there are probably more where knowledge sharing is damnably unlikely. We've been talking for years about how to institute "incentives" and set "policies" that are supposed to create knowledge-sharing organizations. Most of the time they don't work.

But Tim (and Jive) have been very wise to pick the cases that work the right way. Deal management (some would call it case management) is one example where the various players are not altruistically dropping what they're doing to help out; this is a case where being part of the team IS their job. "You don't have to convince them to do it," says Tim.

Plus, it helps when it's easier. "Social gives people one place where they can coordinate across links, everything is a threaded discussion, you don't have to sift through stuff lost in people's inboxes. People are already doing this work; social technology just gives them an easier way to do it and save time."

Pretty much the goal of KM. Social might be the answer to making it real. Read on for more thoughts on the subject.