What's in Store for Enterprise Social Networks?
Jinfo Blog

By Ana Neves

Abstract

Ana Neves brings together the thoughts of some experienced professionals to identify the top trends in enterprise social tools and what needs to change in order to achieve real business impact.

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Enterprise social tools have been around for a while. As with so many other technologies, they have promised a lot but few organisations can honestly vouch for their positive impact on business. In this post, we bring together the thoughts of some experienced professionals to identify the top trends in enterprise social tools.

Despite all the promises, enterprise social tools are not yet having the expected business impact. "Since sometime last year we've been leaving the hype phase of enterprise social networks (ESN), and I think the novelty is somewhat wearing off," says Alvaro Caballero, enterprise collaboration platform manager.

Why the Lack of Impact? 

The reasons are diverse. Samuel Driessen, intranet senior consultant, believes that "social tool implementations fail because of lack of goal and purpose definition, because the goal/purpose is not aligned with business goals" or "because the wrong tool is selected". Alvaro also points out that "ESN is a technology that, in order to leverage all its potential, requires a change of business practices". And that does not seem to be happening in the majority of organisations.

"We are in the early days of a rapid transition, away from work technologies based on large social scale and organised around managing people, toward smaller social scale and geared toward people getting their own work done," says Stowe Boyd, research director at Work Futures Research.

This is rocking the market and the engrained organisational structures and behaviours. And, although these changes might be forcing many managers out of their comfort zone, Luis Suarez, digital humanist & people enabler, contends that they have had plenty of time to adapt. Luis warns managers, "don’t get us to question your management and leadership skills by neglecting or failing to embrace social networking for business.

Trends in enterprise social tools as identified by Alvaro Caballero, Samuel Driessen, Stowe Boyd, Luis Suarez and Paul Corney

Where Are We Heading?

The future of enterprise social tools will, therefore, involve a mix of technical evolutions and organisational changes. On the technical front, Paul Corney, managing partner of Knowledge et al, points out the accelerated growth of video (and video blogs). Samuel mentions mobile as a big trend, "we are only just finding out how important mobile is and what mobile is best used for".

Paul believes that the value of social tools lies in "making people aware and allowing people to collaborate in making decisions or finding 'stuff' out". However, despite all the technical developments, enterprise social tools will keep falling short of expectations until they are properly "adopted".

And adoption will only happen once:

• Tools are properly integrated into work processes and other existing platforms (according to Samuel); and

• Organisations rethink how transparency, trust and hierarchy are embedded into the way they do business (based on Alvaro's experience).

Next Steps

It is therefore crucial that, through events such as Social Now Europe 2015, companies clearly identify:

• What they can really expect to achieve
• Which are the best enterprise social tools to support those goals
• How tools can be used to replace or complement existing ones, and
• How to best integrate enterprise social tools into work processes (new or existing ones).

Alvaro Caballero, Samuel Driessen, Stowe Boyd, Luis Suarez and Paul Corney will all be lending their expertise to the programme and debate of this year's Social Now event which takes place on 20th & 21st April in Amsterdam. 

FreePint is a media partner of Social Now Europe 2015. Readers can receive 20% off with the code "freepint" at socialnow.org.

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