As evidenced by the previous session “Social Networking and the Enterprise” (see post), many businesses can’t articulate the business reasons as to why they should be involved in social networking, yet they’re doing it or want to. There just seems to be a lot of pressure to be in social networking and it’s the “thing to do.”
Pete Fields, Senior VP eCommerce division at Wachovia, told his company’s story of the process they went through to determine the business rationales for deploying social networking across the enterprise. Wachovia ended up rolling out a comprehensive Sharepoint deployment that involved all kinds of communications, IM, group chat, chat retention, one to one video conferencing, video blogging, blogging, enriched profiles, presence awareness, and a lot more
They had a situation where they knew this communications was relevent, but they didn’t know why. So they spent time trying to figure out what’s the business case of doing this in the enterprise.
Wachovia’s business rationales for deploying social networking tools across the enterprise were:
- Work more effectively across time and distance – Took travel budget to finance this social networking effort.
- Better connect and engage employees – Traditionally had company sports leagues to connect with each other. They realized the virtual relationships on social networks are as real as the relationships you create on the softball team or the company picnic.
- Mitigate the impact of a maturing workforce – As people get older and retire or simply leave the company, there’s a loss of knowledge assets. Social networking tools like wikis can capture that wisdom.
- Engage the Gen Y worker – They come to their company with engagement off the scale. Social networking is the way they communicate in their personal lives. They’ve grown up in flat worlds, playing games with people around the world. When they start experiencing friction in the workplace that doesn’t allow them to communicate in their way, they drop off their engagement. Their world is a combination of fact and opinion, plus their participation. They need a voice. They need an outlet.
Not nearly as impactful as the first four, here are Wachovia’s last five rationales.
- Position Wachovia as innovative and forward thinking
- Lift general employee engagement
- Reduce travel expenses
- Provide employees world-class tools with which to compete for business
- Support other key corporate initiatives like going paperless.
They anticipated these last five benefits, but they just didn’t stick like the first four.
Make sure you check out the summary of all coverage from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference 2008 in Boston.
This post is cross-posted from the Enterprise 2.0 Blog.
