The cartoon below makes me laugh because its one of the biggest reasons enterprises consider social software. We are coming out of a fairly rough downturn in the economy where most industries found themselves having to make tough staffing reductions and that left employees who had to truly fight for their jobs. If you didn’t have a silo-driven company before you likely are pulling out of this downturn as one.
But companies are growing, likely yours. You are spending on IT, hiring new employees and reconstructing what was dreadfully torn down over the past 5-7 years. You are seeing that the market and your peers are hyper competitive and as you talk among your peers you are realizing that many are trying to still get more for less and that means having teams collaborate and truly work smarter by working together.
You go back to you leadership team and say, “We need to break down these silos and get people working together and not against each other. We need to collaborate.” Jaws are dropping. Glaze is growing on the eyeballs. Come in social software. Your decimated IT security team can now leverage application masters to help secure new applications. Marketing can build a community to engage partners and customers. The HR team can put everything that an employee would need and build an Idea portal to help learn what employees need and how to increase retention and speed up onboarding.
A month or so later you have a pilot group going with application development migrating documents to wikis to create transparency around product management. People are migrating off your old and non-searchable UCM and putting files IN CONTEXT in communities or personal collections that are easily shared. Next thing you know, people wonder why the collaboration thing took so long to make it to your company. But you and I won’t tell them that they have always collaborated, just now its easier.
