September 24, 2013
By Tim Zonca Senior Director of Product Marketing, Jive Software
Article

Five Ways Social Intranets Solve CIO Problems

Many CIOs have been raked back and forth for much of their careers over the hot coals of the collaboration software crisis and the inability of organizations to build on-the-fly collaborations around projects (as opposed to workflows).

Social intranets can solve all (or at least most) of these collaboration issues. By taking the best usability and scalability features of Facebook, Twitter and other consumer social media tools, the best social intranet technology provides a simple, lightweight, omnipresent collaboration layer that has feature richness required to accomplish real work but is free from the crushing complexity of many legacy collaboration tools.

At the same time, next-gen social intranets can scale up more easily than point-source collaboration solutions, which may work well for teams but not for entire companies. Because relevance and reputation, as well as advanced network analytics, are built into leading-edge social intranet platforms, two additional and complicated layers of other software-enterprise search and network analytics-are made redundant. They are also simultaneously and deeply integrated into the work project flows, where search and knowledge resource discovery are most used. In other words, content is far easier to socialize, share, search and categorize within a proper social intranet framework.

4. Social intranets makes self-service far more viable.
Lots of CIOs have attempted to set up a self-service schema for their users to solve key problems without pinging the help desk or picking up the phone. But self-service has generally failed at many levels, all the way from device support to applications behaving badly to the inability of the IT support staff to properly or easily identify key sources of problems for end users.

Self-service, at best, is a live conversation that incorporates the best aspects of online communities and social media. For this reason, social intranets make self-service a far more viable option.

Further, social intranets put in place a SaaS framework for users that makes the browser the center of their application universe in an app-store-meets-enterprise combination. Users don't have to worry about conflicts between different pieces of hosted application software because that software is only interacting at the internet layer.

At the same time, users can be trusted to install and try out software in accordance with their needs within a social intranet app store framework. By removing software complexity from the equation, social systems make it far easier for CIOs to focus on higher order tasks.

5. Social intranets actually make security easier.
This is a simple but powerful numbers game. A well-executed social intranet deployment will reduce the number of unsanctioned applications running on a CIO's network. And users will have less need for third-party sharing or collaboration tools focused more on the consumer internet.

By reducing (if never entirely eliminating) the use of other social tools that previously were in use, a CIO can rest more easily knowing that the majority of social traffic on his network is running through known ports and through an SSL internet browser transaction layer, a much safer environment than random applications selected by end users.

Simplifying security becomes a bigger imperative in an age when workers demand to access internal networks from anywhere using any device they want, and share access to portions of those networks with third-party collaborators on a nearly on-demand basis.

So by reducing the number of moving parts in an organization's IT ecosystem, social intranets just make life easier. This is not to say a CIO can shut down their firewall, turn off their anti-virus programs, and forget about malware—let alone fire their security-focused network engineers. Rather, social intranets make it easier for them to manage security issues with their existing staff in an era when getting additional seats is harder and harder.

From Geek To Revenue Growth Engine

These are just a handful of the potential benefits a savvy CIO can realize through a smart social intranet strategy. That strategy should not only seek to socialize business processes but also to leverage the way social media inherently works to build a better informed, more responsible, more secure, more collaborative and more efficient organization.

We suspect that there will be a whole lot more benefits coming to light as social intranets become more widespread and organizations gain valuable experience with their own implementations.

For the future-focused CIO, deploying a social intranet turns the page from bolting on obvious social features to revolutionizing how people work and how business results are achieved.

If you haven't gotten started yet, don't wait. Soon social will become a total no-brainer and a key differentiator for both top and bottom line behavior at the IT department and company-wide levels. Now is the time to take the lead. And reap the benefits.

1 See w ww.jivesoftware.com/resources/whitepapers/how-social-business-pays-off