Social Business Readiness: 5 Questions for IT Executives

Posted by Vanessa DiMauro on June 29, 2011

1 comments | 1375 reads

Within the IT department at some firms, the social media pendulum swings to extremes. Companies are either busy banning all forms of social media usage or getting drunk at the social media party and allowing any and all forms of social media tools and behaviors to proliferate within their organizations.

What's often missing is a social business strategy which offers a standardized environment for social implementation in support of business goals. A clearly defined strategy helps prevent erratic social policies as it roots technology decisions in the business realm. In fact, social media offers a strong opportunity for IT executives to take a leadership role in the strategy of social business as they potentially have the knowledge base to mediate between business goals and technical outcomes. Looking even at recent history, the impact of the social business revolution is similar to that which the web had on IT leaders in the mid 1990's. Both the web and social push (or invite depending on the CIO!) IT into business leadership roles.

In order to play a leading role in social business, the IT function can create a purpose-driven social tool kit in support of the business goals of the organization. Factors to consider include:

Does IT management have a seat at the table when it comes to the formation of a social strategy?
Has IT been given the charter to perform due diligence on social tools and create a standardized list of tools approved for use within the organization?
Does the list of approved social tools include an appropriate range of capabilities? Mobile social networks? Video and voice over IP? Location services? Secure communications?
Do the tools support the needs of the the business? How many tools do you have? Do you know the purpose of the tools? Are they current? Has the social tools list been reviewed or revised in the past 6 months?
Is your technical support staff up-to-speed and capable of supporting your social tool users?

Republished with author's permission from original post by Vanessa DiMauro.

Vanessa DiMauro

Vanessa DiMauro is CEO of Leader Networks, a research and strategy firm that helps organizations create enterprise-level online communities. She is an Executive In Residence at Babson College, and serves as a Research Fellow for the Society of New Communications. She works with leading companies to create social media strategy and align with operations for positive results.

About Vanessa DiMauro |
Connect:

Categories:

1375 reads
Print
Email

1 comments »

Andrew Rudin

June 30, 2011

All good questions . . .

Vanessa: these are great questions. As CIO's evolve into more strategic roles within their companies, they will need to ask and answer the question, "what value does social media bring to our organization?" Of course, social media touches every operating entity within a company.

More fundamentally, IT executives will need to grapple with the often non-IT-like realm of ethics. Any deployment of social media will require establishing codes of conduct for how employees, partners, and others will use the social media tools that IT might support. This is easier said than done for IT people who are steeped in process thinking and rules constraints. Social media is a different animal. It's preferable to establish--and enforce--boundaries of what's not acceptable content and communication versus being picky about what is. Whether IT is the right place for defining those policies can be debated. But IT executives must be prepared to participate in the discussion.

Post new comment

Your name: *

E-mail: *

The content of this field is kept private and will not be shown publicly.

Homepage:

Subject:

Comment: *

Input format

Filtered HTML

Allowed HTML tags: <a> <img> <hr> <table> <tr> <td> <th><ul> <ol> <li> </li><blockquote> <colspan> <rowspan><object>
Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
Images can be added to this post.

Post

Lines and paragraphs break automatically.
Web page addresses and e-mail addresses turn into links automatically.
Images can be added to this post.

More information about formatting options

Notify me when new comments are posted

All comments

Replies to my comment

CAPTCHA

This question is for testing whether you are a human visitor and to prevent automated spam submissions.

What code is in the image?: *

Enter the characters shown in the image.

MarketPlace

Global Customer Experience Management (CEM) Certification Program

[May 30-31, Frankfurt; July 25-26, Hong Kong] An internationally recognized program with proven track record of success - being run for 34 times in 13 cities with attendees from 50 countries, the program is developed based on the U.S. patent-pending Branded CEM Method which aims to drive customer loyalty and brand differentiation with quantifiable business results. Limited offer: USD300 early bird discount.

Join us on May 29th in New York City. Stuart Ryder, SVP, Mobile Research Lead for Ipsos IOTX & Roxana Strohmenger, a leading Forrester analyst, will be in attendance to share best practices and new trends in mobile market research.

[June 12, Sir Francis Drake Hotel] Gregson Siu, Vice President, Ariba Business Operations, Ariba and Bob Thompson, CustomerThink, will be in attendance to share best practices, new trends and latest research to help you develop your customer experience program.

Social Networking and sCRM International Congress in Colombia

[June 25-26, Bogota] Thirteen international thought leaders will present, from different perspectives, the trends, the uses, and the magic - as well as the reality - of Social Networking and how it impacts the way customers are doing/will do business.

Driving ROI With VoC

Walker has identified multiple ways to measure ROI – there is not a one-size-fits-all solution. This paper will address each and conclude with some recommendations to help B-to-B practitioners evaluate which ROI approach will work best for their particular business need.