Before we can discuss how organisations get their employees to meaningfully engage with a collaboration platform (user adoption), we need to briefly address the question of why collaborate at all?

Fortunately we are in the middle of a perfect storm in terms of both organisational and consumer shift. The digital technology that we use to do our jobs and to run our personal affairs is dove-tailing at speed. And this is making it easier by the minute for people to understand the social business imperative (i.e. why use a collaboration platform at work). One has only to think of the process of changing jobs today to see this symbiosis in action – company websites, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter are increasingly acting as interlinked processes in helping people to decide on possible employment paths. The same is
true from the organisational viewpoint where a consumer review on Twitter or Trip Advisor can directly affect company policy and strategy.

A recent McKinsey study indicates that there is an immediate 25 per cent improvement in organisational efficiency when companies successfully deploy a collaboration platform. The reduction of long hours spent wading through email trails or repeating discussions for people who were not pre-sent in meetings or conference calls are some of the immediate benefits enjoyed by users of a social business platform. More importantly, in an increasingly competitive global economy, CEOs are alive to the fact that a well-executed social business strategy can at last capture and share the 80 per cent
of company knowledge that exists in employees’ heads. Let’s be perfectly clear, this is NOT traditional knowledge management which used technology to create an exchange of information via some form of digital file management. This is about human interaction based on a common interest or purpose.

As a result of the staggering adoption of social networking platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn, we have arrived at what Marshal McLuhan (a Canadian philosopher) referred to as the ‘Global Village’. McLuhan, who predicted the World Wide Web three decades before its invention, described the Global Village as a place where humans who do not know each other can form groups, influence each other, and then disperse at speed without any barriers and at virtually zero cost. It is no surprise that recent IBM research estimated the social business marketplace to be worth $99bn by 2016.

Follow us now on the 10 Steps to deploying a successful social business platform journey – Step One

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