Five Ways Social Intranets Solve CIO Problems

So every CIO is supposed to have a social strategy because social is taking over the universe. It's the preferred way people communicate at work or at the office.

OK, you get it.

But what if I told you that, in fact, a social intranet will help you elevate your game and make savvy CIOs more valuable in their own companies? Or that a CIO who does a good job deploying a social intranet will likely solve other thorny enterprise IT problems?

Five reasons why CIOs should embrace social intranets:

1.  Social intranets drive demonstrable value across the enterprise.
Yes, lots of other products from the pre-social period—when transactional packages and systems of record dominated—showed substantial ROI. Content management systems allowed companies to let anyone edit a Web page or manage content. ERPs made it far easier to track gross margins and organize complex manufacturing and procurement cycles. But all of these earlier advances were effectively siloed in one or a few business units.

Traditional intranets were the first effort to use a broad knowledge management tool for business process and efficiency improvements. But they rarely worked because, let's face it, they were rigid, top-down systems that forced users into content-centric practices, rather than allowing them to engage in context-driven collaboration that suited their needs. The intranet put control of information distribution in the hands of a few overseers, the definition of a broadcast network rather than a social medium.

Social intranets add the critical interactive dimension missing from conventional static intranets. They add a rich layer of connection and collaboration, providing the human context that makes content meaningful and useful. And whereas traditional intranets rely on a few people to curate assets and keep everyone informed, social intranets turn everyone into curators and stakeholders, collectively ensuring that information is up-to-date, relevant and brought to the attention of those who need it. Done right, a social intranet can lead to dramatic improvements in information flow, knowledge capture, innovation, strategic alignment and workforce productivity.

A recent analysis of several hundred companies by a top-three global business consultancy showed just how big the impacts can be.¹ In a study of several hundred companies, researchers found that, on average, best-of-breed social intranets:

• Improved employee productivity by 15%;
• Grew top-line value by 2%-4%;
• Reduced email load by 21%;
• Reduced meetings by 16%;
• Reduced the time to find knowledge, expertise and best practices by 34%; and
• Reduced employee turnover by 24%.

In addition to the companywide benefits, social systems moved the needle significantly in lines of business such as sales and marketing:

• Increased sales per rep by 13%;
• Decreased deal cycle time by 22%;
• Decreased sales rep onboarding time by 23%;
• Decreased sales support needed by 14%;
• Reduced time on marketing campaigns by 12%; and
• Decreased collateral development time by 28%.

These value metrics can help a CIO build a strong case not only for social intranets but also help them frame the IT department as a key driver of broad ROI possibilities and actual savings in huge categories that touch the entire company.

2.  Social intranets provide analytics that demonstrate the value of knowledge sharing.
Coupled with the right analytic tools, social intranets offer unprecedented insight into critical processes and behavior. For starters, CIOs and community managers can track adoption, usage and other key activity metrics to measure and optimize the social intranet itself.

But that's just the beginning. As social intranets become a primary channel for connection, expertise location, enterprise search and collaboration within an organization, they generate a mother lode of intelligence that can be used to answer some of the questions at the heart of company success: How engaged are employees? How aligned is the organization? How effective are onboarding and training assets. How successful are internal initiatives and programs? What functions are underperforming?

Semantic analysis and other techniques can reveal intents and sentiments, opening a huge array of other potential uses including more proactive engagement, interventional training and capacity additions.

As a result, the CIO moves from someone responsible primarily for tactical and operational support to someone who provides more crucial strategic direction and a better understanding of what employees are thinking, saying and doing. By capturing real-time activity and results, the CIO is accessing—for the first time—critical information that fuels an organization's growth.

3.  Social intranets solve the collaboration conundrum.
Building a useful and widely used collaboration environment for the enterprise has historically been hard. The graveyard of "big IT projects" is littered with orphaned document management systems, little-used intranet portals, half-baked Wikis and the like.

Why did they fail or underwhelm? Because all of them are too hard to use or a poor fit in their own special way.

Many worked great for a certain cohort that was heavily bought-in, but failed with other parts of the organization that were less enthused with, say, learning a Wiki markup language or dealing with an intranet that was rarely updated with timely information. Some collaboration tools scale nicely across an organization but fail to pull together enough key functionality to make them relevant.

Likewise, collaboration tools that may work for one part of a business can fail to entice other parts to partake. A collaboration tool that works great for a marketing communications team by giving them video upload, group editing and blogging capabilities may be far less well-received by the finance team if it fails to make it easy for them to internally publish key financial data and maintain security.

Also, many collaboration tools do not play nice on mobile devices. And few collaboration tools do a job good of capturing reputation and relevance data in order to identify the best responses, most appropriate documents or the most useful resources on specific topics. The latter is a key part of collaboration because, frankly, how many times have you seen emails fly around your staff asking where a document is located? Or someone trying to find an email sent six months ago that included a key piece of information?

The upshot? Legacy collaboration tools scale poorly, are not easy enough to use, don't fulfill needs of all intended users, and can't capture reputational information or perform sophisticated network analysis to identify relevant information and people.