Download the roadmap - AIIM

34 Pages·2011·3.82 MB·English

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About This Report 2
AIIM developed this report to provide a roadmap for organizations to implement social business processes and
technologies quickly, effectively, and responsibly. It was developed from a variety of publicly available resourc-
es as well as the authors’ experiences and those of a number of industry experts.
About AIIM
For over 60 years, AIIM has been the leading non-profit organization focused on helping users to understand
the challenges associated with managing documents, content, records, and business processes. AIIM was
founded in 1943 as the National Microfilm Association and later became the Association for Information and
Image Management. AIIM is also known as the enterprise content management (ECM) association.
Today, AIIM is international in scope, independent, and implementation-focused. As the industry’s intermedi-
ary, AIIM represents the entire industry - including users, suppliers, and the channel.
As a neutral and unbiased source of information, AIIM serves the needs of its members and the industry.
http://www.aiim.org.
Authors
Jesse Wilkins, Director, Systems of Engagement
Andrea Baker, Manager, Systems of Engagement Development
Permissions
Attribution-Share Alike – Creative Commons

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
Publication Date
v1.0 published March 18, 2011
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Contents
Executive Summary............................................................................
4
Introduction.......................................................................................
5
Empowerment ..................................................................................
7
1. Emergence ...................................................................................
8
2. Strategy.........................................................................................
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3. Development................................................................................
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4. Monitoring....................................................................................
17
5. Participation.................................................................................
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6. Engagement ................................................................................
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7. Governance .................................................................................
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8. Optimization.................................................................................
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Conclusion.........................................................................................
27
What’s Next?....................................................................................
28
AIIM Social Business Strategy Workshop.........................................
29
Glossary............................................................................................
31
Works Cited.......................................................................................
33
About the Authors ............................................................................
34
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Executive Summary 4
This report is designed to provide organizations with a formal framework for evaluating and implementing
social processes and technologies both inside and outside the firewall. It begins by describing the specific and
often tangible business benefits associated with social technologies, including greater engagement with cus-
tomers and improved collaboration among employees and their broader networks.
The roadmap itself opens with a discussion of Empowerment; the preconditions required to support and
sustain social business practices over time. Empowerment consists of transparency, trust, and technology.
Transparency requires that the organization move from a culture of knowledge hoarding to one of knowledge
sharing. Trust requires that the organization trust its users to do what is right, while supporting them with the
training and governance required for them to be accountable for that trust. And technology requires willing-
ness to allow employees to experiment with new tools and processes, trusting that they will not abuse them
and permitting them to “fail fast.”
The formal roadmap consists of the following eight steps:
• Emergence
• Strategy
• Development
• Monitoring
• Participation
• Engagement
• Governance
• Optimization
Each step is described in detail over the course of the roadmap. In each step we describe specific issues to con-
sider and actions to take; which issues emerge and which actions are appropriate will depend on a number
of factors we describe including the existing culture of the organization, its regulatory environment, and the
nature of the social technologies and processes in question.
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Introduction 5
2011 could legitimately be considered the year of awakening for social business. Many organizations are mov-
ing beyond simply experimenting with social technologies to incorporating them into key business processes.
Television ads today direct consumers to an organization’s Facebook page rather than its website, and the
growth rate of social technologies continues to surge.
In 2010 an AIIM task force analyzed changes in enterprise information technology and sketched out a road-
map for the next five years. The task force was led by noted author and futurist Geoffrey Moore (Crossing the
Chasm) and included representatives from the world’s leading technology companies.
The task force found that social technologies outside the firewall are redefining the nature of customer rela-
tionships. Often driven by marketing, organizations are using public networks like Facebook and Twitter and
LinkedIn to engage customers, usually with little or no thought as to how this will integrate with existing back-
end systems of record.
At the same time, social technologies are being used inside organizations to drive greater productivity, better
collaboration, and decision speed. And email, which has always been a weak platform for internal and partner
collaboration, is being replaced or augmented by more powerful social platforms.
So how can organizations use social technologies and processes in a way that is effective, responsible, and
supports business goals and objectives? This AIIM roadmap describes the steps necessary to effectively and
responsibly implement social business practices.
What is social business?
Social business is the use of social technologies and processes to improve internal collaboration and external
customer engagement. It is more than simply setting up accounts on commercial services or even implement-
ing enterprise social technologies. Instead, social business processes leverage social technologies within a
culture of collaboration, openness, and sharing to streamline and improve the way organizations conduct
business. As Ross Dawson has noted, “…the real focus of building the social enterprise [is] creating an organi-
zation that does better than its competitors in a way that feeds on itself and cannot be replicated.1”
Benefits of social business. Social business processes and technologies have the potential to radically improve
the way organizations connect and collaborate with their customers, partners, and internal staff. The learn-
ing curve for social technologies is lower because they are simpler and because they are more focused on a
specific set of capabilities. In most cases, the users already have experience using a particular tool or one very
similar to it. In addition users often have experience with social processes in their personal lives as well – tag-
ging photos, updating an activity stream, commenting on content and rating content are now everyday prac-
tices for many.
Here are some specific benefits organizations can achieve through broader use of social processes and tech-
nologies.
• Improve communication and transparency by having executives and staff share thoughts, updates, and
perspectives in social networks
• Capture and share knowledge across the organization in corporate wikis or communities
• Use social tagging, filtering, recommendations, and semantic technologies to identify relevant content and
knowledge
• Identify experts across the organization with user profiles and activity streams
• Improve innovation and responsiveness with better access to experts and knowledge
• Foster collaboration by better identifying relevant staff, projects, tasks, and content
• Reduce operational costs and time to market with virtual teams and social collaboration
• Publish news and updates in a blog or social network
• Set up discussion forums for answering questions from customers, staff, and partners
• Use public-facing blogs and/or Twitter and other commercial social networks to provide thought leadership
and direct communication with customers, media, analysts, and other audiences
• Make it easy for customers to interact with each other to solve problems or identify new opportunities
• Empower staff to respond to support questions via social media
1http://rossdawsonblog.com/weblog/archives/2011/02/what-is-possible-how-the-social-enterprise-drives-differentiation.html
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Social business processes and technologies can directly impact the bottom line. For example, recently DKNY 6
hosted a preview of the spring 2011 collection through BigLive, a streaming/chat room technology. Some of
those items were made available for purchase even before they were available in stores2. Dell is well-known
for its use of Twitter as a sales channel3. And a number of research studies have shown that customers trust
peers more than organizations, but that organizations that engage with communities in an authentic and open
fashion are more trusted than those that don’t4.
“Forty-three percent of the 2009 Inc. 500 reported social media was “very important” to their business/
marketing strategy. That number jumps to 56% in 2010. In addition, 57% report using search engines
and social networking sites to recruit and evaluate potential employees (also an increase from 2009).
Social media is not only used for communication between business and consumers, but for communicating
with vendors and partners as well.” (Nora Ganim Barnes, 2011)
Purpose of the roadmap
This roadmap is a tool to help organizations effectively develop social business processes and to help identify
and address potential issues before they become real problems.
The roadmap is designed as a framework – that is, it addresses a wide variety of issues and challenges, not
all of which will be applicable to every organization. Organizations are encouraged to use this roadmap as
a starting point, but to customize it to their particular circumstances including their regulatory environment,
organizational culture, level of familiarity with different tools, and of course their overall strategic goals and
objectives.
Organizations that follow this roadmap will move from tactical, ad hoc, and suboptimal approaches to social
business technologies to a more strategic and systematic implementation.
Introduction to the roadmap
The social business roadmap consists of eight primary steps. Each step is briefly described here and is ad-
dressed in substantially more detail over the course of the document.
• Emergence. In this step the organization is not using social technologies in any formal or organized way.
Instead, individuals or small groups within the organization are experimenting with social technologies to
determine whether there is business value to them.
• Strategy. Once the organization begins to develop experience with social technologies and has identified
potential business value from their use, it is important to create a framework that identifies how it expects
to use these technologies, and the goals and objectives for their use.
• Development. With the strategy in place, the organization can make informed decisions about what tools
to implement, how to implement them, where to implement them, and how they will potentially scale
more broadly within the organization.
• Monitoring. Initially the organization should spend time monitoring and listening to the conversations
taking place in and around a particular tool to get a sense of the nature of the tool, the content of the
conversations, the target audiences, and who the leading participants are. This is perhaps more visible in
externally focused processes but is important for internal ones as well.
• Participation. Once the organization has done some listening it will be able to participate more meaning-
fully and should begin doing so according to what it has learned about the target market and the nature
of the conversations on the various tools.
2http://mashable.com/2011/02/11/fashion-brands-social-media-roi/
3http://blogs.webex.com/webex_interactions/2010/05/guy-kawasaki-part-three-sell-like-delloutlet-and-kogi-bbq-use-twitter.html
4http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007863
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• Engagement. The goal is for participation to move to engagement – from speaking at or to customers to 7
engaging with them. This means creating processes to respond to issues, both internally and externally,
and ensuring that communications are clear, accurate, and authentic.
• Governance. This step describes the process for developing an effective governance framework for social
business processes. Some of the steps are specific to certain tools or capabilities, while others are more
broadly applicable, such as an acceptable usage policy.
• Optimization. Once social business processes are in place, they should be actively managed and re-
viewed to ensure that the organization is realizing the expected benefits. This includes but is not limited to
monitoring the tools in real time, identifying and measuring specific metrics, and training users on new or
evolving tools and processes.
Empowerment
Empowerment is not a step in the roadmap. Rather, it is a necessary precondition for an organization to effec-
tively implement social business processes and technologies. Without certain elements in place in the orga-
nization’s culture, it will be difficult to gain widespread acceptance and usage of social technologies. These
elements can be grouped into the following areas:
Transparency.
An organization must have a culture that values openness, sharing, and transparency. If employees believe
that their continued employment is contingent on their being the sole subject matter expert, they will be
unwilling to share that valuable knowledge on a wiki or a video. Senior management must foster a culture of
sharing that rewards and even incentivizes employees for making their tacit knowledge explicit.
At the same time, openness and transparency have their limits. The organization needs to ensure that privacy
is safeguarded where appropriate. For example, anonymous ratings may be more honest because there is less
fear of reprisal for negative ratings, but this needs to be balanced against the need for individual accountabil-
ity.
Trust.
This is closely related to openness and transparency – in fact, they can’t exist without trust. Here, though,
we focus on more specific aspects of trust. First, organizations with a very rigid, hierarchical, command-and-
control culture often find it more difficult to effectively use social technologies because they are perceived as a
challenge to the hierarchical model. Organizations should recognize when this is the case and provide visible
and vigorous management support for social technologies.
Trust also means trusting users to do what is right. For the most part, employees know what topics are accept-
able and what aren’t in the context of email, or in-person meetings, or discussions in the break room. They
have already absorbed the organization’s culture and values and simply need guidance and the occasional
reminder. The organization should train users on what is expected and remind them periodically that the same
communications policies and restrictions apply on social technologies as through other channels. At the same
time, the organization should put monitoring and auditing processes in place. We describe approaches to
monitoring and auditing later in the roadmap.
Another aspect of trust is authenticity. People want to engage and have a conversation. You can’t have a con-
versation with an organization – you have a conversation with a person. That person has a personality, and a
certain style, which personalizes the organization in a way that a carefully crafted “message” simply cannot.
The organization has to trust that its employees will represent it faithfully and with its best interests at heart,
and let the personality of a given employee shine through.
This also means that organizations must minimize practices like approving blog posts and Tweets before pub-
lication. In some cases this makes sense; it might even be required in certain regulatory environments. How-
ever, a post that’s been reviewed by twelve layers of bureaucracy will read like it has been – meaning nobody
will ever want to read it.
Management has to trust that users aren’t spending all day playing Facebook games or watching videos on
YouTube. But social technologies are no different in that perspective from any of the technologies that preced-
ed them, including but certainly not limited to cell phones, email, Internet access, computers, or telephones.
When each of these technologies was introduced there was a swift and strong response condemning them for
the negative impact they were expected to make to the organization’s productivity and thus the bottom line.
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There is an extraordinary amount of time is wasted on inefficient communication and collaboration through 8
email systems – yet which organizations today would turn off and block email usage? Users wasting time on
social media would be wasting time regardless – which is a management issue, not a social technology issue.
It should also be noted that the same users who might be thought to be wasting time checking in on Facebook
or Twitter during working hours are also frequently available or even working after hours, often courtesy of
these same social technologies.
Technology.
Finally, there is a technology component to empowerment. In many organizations, the internal IT staff takes
pains to actively block employees from accessing social technologies. For example, the U.S. Army has been
leveraging social technologies to communicate with soldiers and their families for several years; however,
until 2009 many bases blocked soldiers’ access to those tools. A number of senior military officials had blogs,
but their soldiers couldn’t read them because they, too, were banned. We should note that the Army is by no
means alone in this approach. According to a recent AIIM study, 43% of organizations actively bar staff from
accessing common commercial social networking sites5.
This is not just limited to external sites, either. For many organizations IT remains the technology gatekeeper,
if for no other reason than that it will be expected to support whatever applications are installed. Often this
means that social technologies must be justified, a business case presented, detailed requirements defined,
and a procurement process completed that could result in months or more of delay. Meanwhile, even en-
terprise social technologies are within the reach of departmental budgets or individual credit cards, with the
result that those individuals and departments often “route around” IT and implement their own technologies.
Clearly this is not a desirable outcome from a security or support perspective, and yet it continues to happen.
There is a balance to be struck between the legitimate security, privacy, and supportability needs of the orga-
nization and its business and operational needs. IT should be engaged in those conversations early and often
but should determine approaches and strategies that allow the organization to experiment with emerging
technologies and even “fail fast” where that is appropriate.
1. Emergence
The first of the eight steps is Emergence. Emergence often takes place under the radar of management and is
occurring at the organization in small pockets. This is the experimental environment cultivated from within by
those who naturally seek to innovate and challenge existing or outdated business practices.
However, organizations should be actively aware of whether this type of emergence is occurring within their
organization, and if so, in what ways. You should be aware that there are existing technologies that could
improve or positively impact internal and external business processes and should evaluate them to determine
if there is value in using them. Organizations frequently pay consultants and change agents to advise them on
how to innovate; if your organization has someone or some small group working in their spare cycles to bring
in new technologies organically and independent of the mainstream technologies and processes, this is a good
thing and should be encouraged.
5Putting Enterprise 2.0 to Work”, http://www.aiim.org/Research/AIIM-White-Papers/Putting%20E20%20to%20Work
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1.1 Encourage innovation 9
Accept that somewhere in the organization a group of innovators has formed. This is your organization’s
“skunk works” - give them a white board and ideas will happen. Your organization should actively support
and encourage this innovation. Management should provide visible support through public acknowledgement
and recognition, for example by publishing good ideas on the intranet or even by providing material rewards.
“The general task of social brainstorming isn’t one that necessitates large numbers on the order of thou-
sands and tens of thousands of participants—it can occur in smaller groups within departments focused
on more tactical issues and local scope. It is not simply a matter of scale but also a question of commonal-
ity between the people involved: relevancy to their roles, shared goals for the group, and the strength of
relationships between people within that group.” (Rawn Shah, 2011)
1.2 Find external reference examples
It is the innovation team’s duty to find or receive examples of other organizations using technologies or pro-
cesses to accomplish similar needs. They can accomplish this by reading thought leaders’ blogs, following Twit-
ter streams of industry experts, reviewing vendor-provided case studies, attending virtual or in-person confer-
ences and networking events, and reading white papers, books, and periodicals.
1.3 Prototype
When a new tool is introduced and released to the general public for registration, your team will want to sign
up for the tool to evaluate its use and look at possible business models the technology could enhance. This
freedom to play with technology will inspire the ideas because the environment fosters innovation.
1.3.1 External. Start a new presence on a commercial social media service – but do not worry about doing too
much in the way of marketing your presence at first. Experiment with the tool and try to determine whether
there is value to its use beyond the novelty or “coolness” factor.
1.3.2 Internal. Not all social media technology has to be or is external. Some of these technologies can work
well within your organization’s intranet. As such, these collaborative tools can provide substantial benefits to
your organization when implemented at the broadest possible level. Establish the technologies on the intranet
in a small use case. This will provide the opportunity to set up the environment properly with IT and experi-
ment with how to connect it to other legacy business systems.
2. Strategy
Establishing your organization’s strategy for implementation and execution of how you will integrate social
media technologies into your business is a step often overlooked in favor of implementation. “Just do it” or
“just make it work and I don’t care how” attitudes without the benefit of strategy can lead to mistakes and lost
time recouping knowledge and processes.
At the same time, social business is more than simply inserting social media into the business. It is more about
developing a consistent and comprehensive approach to social media, across platforms and to some extent
platform-independent. It is about standardization in how the different areas of the organization approach
tools, applying what you learned from the prototyping done during the Emergence step, and bringing more
users and departments to use the tool consistently and effectively. This is perhaps the key differentiator be-
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tween a business that happens to use social media, and a social business. 10
In this step your organization will conduct the initial assessment, begin the planning and project management,
and determine how to market the concept to others in your organization.
“@KrisColvin (Kristi Colvin) -- @thebrandbuilder I think every corporation should ask themselves, “do we
have a social media culture, or a social media page/profile”???” (Colvin, 2011)
2.1 Conduct an organizational assessment
Starting with an internal and/or external assessment based on the desired state of engagement with one or
more communities should be priority before you go any further in this roadmap. You can begin by asking se-
nior management and stakeholders the following questions.
• Who are the actual stakeholders for this initiative and what are their perspectives?
• Does – or will – our organization foster an environment of collaboration and co-creation?
• What are the goals and objectives of the social media initiative(s)?
• Determine your priorities – what is most important to achieve?
• What is working within your organization and what is broken?
• Who are your target audiences? Are you trying to focus internally in the organization, externally to your
customers, or both?
• What social technologies are being used formally / informally by your organization?
• What social business processes and practices are being used in the organization and how effective are
they currently?
• What social technologies are desired that are not being used or available?
• Where are the interesting conversations happening currently?
• What are your competitors doing? Are they successful?
The results of this assessment should be used to conduct a gap analysis so the organization can understand
what it needs to do to achieve success in this initiative. This gap analysis will be used to develop the custom
roadmap as described in the Strategy step.
2.2 Conduct a brand assessment
Another key part of the assessment is to determine whether your organization is in control of its brand. You
should conduct a thorough search, both through social media and through more traditional search engines, to
see if you have a presence on various commercial services. Where you find organization-related accounts, you
need to determine whether or not they are official presences. It is not uncommon for different users or depart-
ments within an organization to set up accounts on popular or new commercial services – in fact this is part of
what we described in the Emergence step. In many cases a simple email or direct message to the owner of the
account will get the conversation going.
If you cannot determine that your organization controls a particular account, you should contact the service
and ask for your official presence to be verified. For example, Twitter verifies some accounts automatically (no-
tably politicians and celebrities) and displays a unique icon on those accounts. Even where this is not available,
however, you should ask the service for control over the account where it is clear that it could be associated
with your brand or cause confusion.
Doing this can help you in the event there is an unauthorized presence of your brand on a commercial ser-
vice. For example, during the British Petroleum gulf oil spill of 2010, BP did not have an official presence on
Twitter. An opportunist created the Twitter account “BPGlobalPR6” and proceeded to present themselves as the
voice of BP, until it was proven that they were not the official voice. The BPGlobalPR account then reformatted
their Twitter page, claiming to raise awareness of the company and its practices. BP eventually notified Twitter
that BPGlobalPR was not an authorized BP account and then went on to create an official presence7.
2.3 Begin the planning and project management
The next step is to use the results of the assessments to do some planning. While social technologies and
processes can be faster to implement than more traditional ones, they still require proper planning in order to
avoid costly mistakes and rework.
6“BPGlobalPR Twitter Page” http://twitter.com/BPGlobalPR
7“Official BP_America Twitter Page” http://twitter.com/BP_America