The internal IT department, headed by the CIO, no longer acts as the gatekeeper for all new technology coming into the enterprise. IT may stand at the gate to the castle, but SaaS and social media startups are swimming across the moat. Internal IT can still set fire to the moat and otherwise make life difficult. But how do you make this a win/win relationship, so that they welcome your entry? Start by understanding how IT is thinking about social media.
Although we will make some generalizations about CIOs in this post, we recognize that there is a huge continuum from progressive to traditional.
Generally CIOs love technology and innovation. It is why they went into technology. Nor do CIOs want to control everything, they know it is impossible and life is too short. Most see that Social Media technology has positive potential. But they do have legitimate concerns. Specifically, social media startups that want to tap enterprise budgets need to deal with 5 big worries:
1. Unpredictable scaling issues. Twitter failure is OK when we are just twittering about our cats, but would be totally unacceptable if this was an enterprise app. The viral nature of adoption is a concern for people who have to ensure that the lights are on and the trains run on time. If you are asking people to do serious business on your service, you have to be solid on the reliability and performance scores.
2. Security against IP loss. This is a legitimate concern. The impact can be major. The fact is that it is no longer possible to "bolt the stable door" as the horse has already escaped. It is virtually impossible to stop an employee, either foolishly or maliciously, sending digital data that should not be sent. Just make sure that your service does not make this worse and has some reasonable controls.
3. Integration. This is the big "well what about...." objection. Just touting open Internet standards is not enough. You need to show how to build adapters to internal legacy systems that don't work to those standards. Without integration you cannot answer the next one. Building adapters is tedious work. But once you have a library of them, they become a barrier to entry.
4. Loss of productivity. Services for consumers do not need to answer the productivity question. We do this stuff for fun and in our free time. But when that time creeps into the 9-5 workday, it is a legitimate concern for those who pay the salaries.
5. Accidental brand damage. People who grew up with social media know that the brand cannot be be protected other than by great products and services. Anything bad that happens will get out there. However this scares the bejesus out of traditional Enterprise managers. It is also a legitimate concern that if you give a lot of powerful social media tools to people who don't know how to use them wisely, there will be a lot of collateral damage. Like physicians you need to show that your service will "do no harm".
These are all negative, objection issues. Clearly there needs to be a compelling positive reason. We will focus on that in a future post. First step is making sure these objections don't stop you on the way in.
If you want to listen directly to one CIO who is thinking hard about this, see this podcast by Intel CIO John "JJ" Johnson on social media in the enterprise.
What have you experienced? As a vendor, have you found and handled these or other issues? As a customer, have Social Media start-ups shown a good understanding of these issues? What other issues are critical?
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A lot of large organizations we speak to have these exact concerns, especially with security and integration. The discussions revolve around our business, online groups, and they always seem to bring up social media/networking features that they hear about. As discussions move further along, then they get worried about productivity, etiquette, and image. For a lot of people we meet, there isn't a clear idea of how social media can positively impact an organization.
fyi, my company is Convos - private, productive online groups
http://www.convos.com
Posted by: JP
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September 9, 2008 8:28 PM
The 1st issue (scalability and the twitter example) can be easily solved by not using Ruby.
Posted by: Matt | September 10, 2008 1:47 AM
If you want to learn more about how some corporate technology managers are approaching social media in a creative and responsible way I recommend reading the blog of my friend Jim MacLennan:
http://cazh1.com/blogger/thoughts/thoughts_blog.shtml
Dennis D. McDonald
Alexandria, Virginia
http://www.ddmcd.com
Posted by: Dennis McDonald | September 10, 2008 4:45 AM
Good article. I think in #3 Integration you mean that once you have a library of adapters they remove a barrier to entry (or become a bridge to entry?). Since having a library would make integration easier.
Separately this article emphasizes a point I think is very important. Many web software vendors market "remove IT from the equation" which I think is a mistake. Even in a SaaS system there are still concerns you address here. Marketers! Keep IT in the loop! It will make everyone's life easier.
Posted by: Sarah Worsham | September 10, 2008 7:10 AM
A good read, several legitimate issues and i will look forward to the ready positive arguments soon!
Posted by: Lee J | September 10, 2008 7:11 AM
"...4. Loss of productivity. Services for consumers do not need to answer the productivity question. We do this stuff for fun and in our free time. But when that time creeps into the 9-5 workday, it is a legitimate concern for those who pay the salaries."
Do CIOs wish they could bring back the days when there was no internet, no mobile phones, you come in and were chained to your station and worked non-stop for 14 hours straight? No personal phone calls, no social media? They wish the work place was like the Roman ship in Ben Hur?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AgvEtMlu7Xw
"We keep you alive to serve this ship. Row well and live."
Posted by: Todd | September 10, 2008 7:19 AM
Very interesting post indeed. I am a in charge of marketing and selling our products, and I am finding it difficult to speak to the right people in organizations. Do you think that it would be better to speak and deal directly with the IT dept or should I deal with a few different people in an organization, like HR and the communications dept?
Whats the best way to include them all in the loop?
Cheers
Posted by: Danny Ward | September 10, 2008 8:28 AM
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Posted by: Danny Ward | September 10, 2008 8:30 AM
My view is that the statement "Generally CIOs love technology and innovation. It is why they went into technology. Nor do CIOs want to control everything, they know it is impossible and life is too short. "
Let me explain.
First of all, I spent the last year as a IT Strategy consultant for a *very* large IT firm. In that time, I was exposed to many CIOs and know their personality types quite well.
The reality is, they don't LOVE technology and innovation. People who love technology and innovation generally shoot for CTO on the product side.
Most internal IT shops are VERY skeptical about new technologies, and tend to follow others as opposed to lead. The lack formal processes for evaluating IT innovation, and portfolio management processes prevent many innovations from getting through due to the inability to make a sound business case for the proposed projects.
However, I do agree that you have hit on some key management issues with your post. Especially the one regarding integration: Enterprise architecture and data architecture is becoming increasingly important for the enterprise.
Let's face it, most CIOs are expected to think about things at the C-Level. So that is ensuring the right balances of effective process, technology and people.
Social media is no different from how businesses operate today except that whatever you say, could potentially be stored forever.
As such, companies, and CIOs need to ensure their people are properly informed (via policy and training) that they need to constantly be aware of their actions, not expose certain information, get legal and communications to check certain content, and be accountable for their actions.
Finally, there is an additional challenge of the loss of perceived benefits from 'real life' face-to-face interactions. Social media and web 2.0 type tools de-emphasize the importance of face to face interactions on a constant basis. However, research has shown that these constant face to face interactions actually harm productivity.
A related post from my blog:
http://www.sumolabs.com/blog/dawn-enterprise-nomadic-workforce-work-wherever-whenever
Jordan Willms
http://www.sumolabs.com
Posted by: Jordan Willms | September 10, 2008 10:20 AM
First off, you nail what has been my experience in working with enterprises looking to integrate social media/community building into online strategy.
On the one hand, the driver of social media adoption is not generally IT. It's Marketing, in the case of external customer/constituency facing communities, and Communications, in the case of internal employee-centered community initiatives.
On the other, IT does have a rightful say in vetting whether a vendor scales, integrates, is secure and the like, so the paradox is at what point do you bring IT into the equation?
Case in point, my company, Snapp Networks (www.snappville.com), provides a solution applicable to both internal and external community builders. The use cases, functional requirements and supporting workflows are relatively baked at this point (in terms of customer needs), but experience to date has been that 25% of the selling time is spent winning the buyer (marketing/comms) and 75% is spent navigating the IT waters.
Clearly, that is no
Posted by: Mark Sigal
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September 10, 2008 11:15 AM
Great article
As someone that talks on a daily basis with companies about our services, specifically Radian6, which is firstly Saas and secondly a Social Media Monitoring and Engagement platform I can agree that some IT people can take issue with Social Media.
I have had the same experiences with IT staff previously when discussing SaaS such as Salesforce. I don't think they are intentionally obstructive to the process just genuinely concerned about security, reliability, scalability etc
Posted by: Matthew Brazil | September 10, 2008 12:40 PM
Agree with issues you mention.
Our discussions with corporates about Enterprise 2.0 tells us that three different integrations are of importance (a) Integration of the new solution with other enterprise applications (b) integration of intranet/sharepoint/portal software/KM system, and (c) integration with any enterprise 2.0 pieces (blogs, wikis) which are already in use. Unless we can answer all of them, there is trouble selling to them.
Enterprise 2.0 solution has to be ready to live in the ecosystem of the enterprise; but a long list of adapters is difficult. How about the other way integration? The Enterprise 2.0 blocks designed as widgets that can integrate any other enterprise application or intranet or a wiki. The cost of integration at the browser is way too inexpensive compared to working with other application APIs/libraries.
Posted by: Jay Pullur | September 15, 2008 1:55 AM
Great post. Especially I see the first three issues being major concerns. I do think some Enterprise 2.0 vendors get it - in terms of addressing security, integration and scalability issues in their products. They still have to fight an uphill battle in the enterprise world against the software giants.
Posted by: Danielle | September 17, 2008 8:14 AM
Can you expand and clarify exactly what you mean by IP Loss for the lesser knowledgeable crowd?
Posted by: Chris Estes | October 5, 2008 9:14 PM