Often times, I would say that the last place to possible start an IT project that would be business facing would be in IT itself. Not that most haven’t successfully deployed projects on behalf of business but often times, business problems started and tried to be solved through and by the IT department most often fail or go awry. I am going to say that starting out as a social business, that could be an exception to the rule.
Why? Because often very few other business units have as many silos and complex business processes. Think about the mere fact of troubleshooting IT issues. Not necessarily servers or outages but basic IT troubleshooting – like connecting guests to the guest wifi or creating a distribution list. These are, to the average IT professional, very mundane and routine items – certainly not worthy of a service ticket. So what could transforming to a social business do to help this? The power of a wiki is a great thing as well as that coupled with the combination of Troubleshooting/Service Desk Community. Not only is the place of IT to service the enterprise but often there are non-IT people who can help solve issues. There are a ton of people that are in your enterprise who can help solve what one might consider the basics – these people can be level-one of your service organization. What? How can you build value if you can’t matrix and measure everything your service team does? That is my point. There is very little value solving simple mundane troubleshooting items when someone has already done and likely documented it. The value is solving mission critical issues – when Instant Messanging goes down or your email server is down. It’s a great opportunity to bring your service department up to a level that not only adds tremendous value to the enterprise but personally brings them up a notch in their career.
Another area is enterprise IT documentation. Historically, transparency, documentation and knowledge-transfer in projects has been encouraged or required but rarely adhered to. Why? Often times it might be job security or ego or other items. But many of times I have walked on to a project and as we go through requirements we ask “so who is responsible for this application?” And the answer is “Oh, that was written by Joe and he left a few weeks/months/years ago.” Ugh! Or there IS documentation and its buried in some complex content repository that can’t meaningfully searched to find it. Not only do you have a rogue application that no one knows about it but no one off-boarded this employee to figure out WHAT he knew. Often times all some people need is the basic of being wanted and valued. That is where social software and the transformation to a social business is powerful. Those obscure developers or that person in marketing who just knows everything about how to find things in SharePoint are just looking for someone to label them the “expert”. Everyone likes to be valued – bottom line. So a key point in rolling out social software is to allow people to be tagged and to allow others to tag you. Additionally, not locking down functions of a social platform like the ability to create a wiki or forum on a topic is key to encouraging this transparent behavior. Items like communities or maybe blogs are items that can be reserved or moderated but free-flow can be a good practice in those areas.
The conclusion of this all is often the last place an IT project is the first place one should look for efficiencies and high-value ROI for selling social software and the social business concept. Today the least traditional places to for IT to blossom is now the most obvious.
