Let’s consider two kinds of portals: one is a place where stuff is, the other is a place where people exist. Most portals start out as the former, and they tend to stay that way. In most organizations, the portal is a place where stuff is. You go there when you need some stuff, or when your boss tells you to. When people have a hard time understanding why the portal adoption is not higher in a particular organization, or why people are not more enthusiastic, there’s a good chance that they have failed (or not attempted) to create a place where people exist.
If you are creating a new portal, or doing a migration/upgrade of your old portal, and if you want to create a portal that is a place where people exist, then you need to lead with identity. When the new portal is launched, your employees have had their identity “instantiated” in the portal—a task that was started by the organization, but would ideally be completed by the employee him/herself: filling out the user profile, entering interests and expertise, updating their status, making social connections, starting a personal site or blog.
Considered by themselves, these activities may seem superfluous. Why in the heck would we want people sitting around twiddling with their user profiles? It’s a reasonable question that people have been asking. Where is the business value? Well, here is the answer: a portal where users have a strong sense of identity is a high leverage business investment. Asynchronous, low friction communications that can take place in the virtual world of the portal are more efficient, less costly, scalable, and more dynamic—not to mention, much less inhibited by real world limitations like geography, time zone, and even language. If you want to gain those benefits, you need to build a place where people exist. The first step on that journey is to invest in identity. Without a strong sense of virtual identity across your user population, all you will ever have is a place where stuff is.
Coming back to enterprise social networking then, there are two simple messages. First, if you want enterprise social networking, start with establishing a virtual identity for your users that is tied to your organizational identity; get that right first. Second, only choose social networking tools that can federate with your single-source system of record for identity (probably Active Directory, if you are at all Microsoft-oriented)—do not duplicate identity in social networking islands. If a whizz-bang social networking tool will create an identity island in your organization, keep looking for a better tool. Dispersed identity is a strategic problem for an organization.
Enterprise Social: It All Starts With Identity
by Walter Rowland on August 1st, 2012 | ~ minute read
