Promoting and maintaining good teamwork is essential for any business but it can be increasingly challenging as the business grows and its people become geographically separated across countries and continents. The need to adapt to a 24/7 culture and provide better communication, empowerment, competitive speed and new approaches to operations and projects put further pressure on communication and collaboration methods.
A smart business enterprise is able to capitalise on their entire workforce by providing the means for younger workers to harness the knowledge, experience and motivation of older workers to fuel their enthusiasm and fresh-thinking.
The Social Computing Advantage
Social computing can be a key tool for achieving this result by allowing organisations to maximise business value from experiences and ideas that have been produced through collaboration, in the same way as they would through natural social behaviour. It can also serve as a way to facilitate conversations across both time and distance, as well as preserving the spontaneity of unstructured communication.
In the June 2009 Microsoft white paper, Social Computing in the Enterprise , some of the strategic business goals that social computing can support include:
- Providing a more natural way to capture and share tacit knowledge, which can be especially beneficial when key workers leave the organisation
- Enabling employees to quickly find and engage with experts elsewhere in the organisation.
- Provide a familiar infrastructure to attract, nurture and retain younger talent
- Provide a clear understanding to managers of team dynamics and more natural ways to share insights and collaborate.
Unfortunately, a 2009 study by Robert Half Technology, an IT staffing firm in the US, which was reported on the Computerworld Web site in October 2009, showed that many companies have reacted to the uncertainties and risks of social computing by banning or imposing strict policies on the use of sites like Facebook or Twitter.
As reported in the July 2009 ZDNet article 'Top ten issues adopting enterprise social computing' by Dion Hinchcliffe, there remains a feeling by some companies that social computing software is too risky to use for core business activities and that it won't work in particular industries. The side effect of this approach is that organisations can find themselves having more and better information about their workforce posted on external social computing sites - where's it's visible to everyone - than is available internally.
The Value of Tacit Knowledge
Tacit knowledge (unlike explicit knowledge, such as manuals and procedures which are easier to communicate) is knowledge that people are often not aware they possess or how it can be valuable to others. It may rarely be documented but instead gained from on-the-job experience and outside knowledge that some people may bring to their work.
Tacit knowledge requires a different approach to articulate and includes skills such as learning a language, which can't be learned purely by following the rules of grammar but must be experienced instead. It can represent an organisation's competitive advantage and aid workers when working on projects or engaging with customers but is always at risk of being lost when employees leave or change roles.
Social computing can provide an ideal solution for sharing tacit knowledge but, like many other technological solutions, it can't solve the knowledge transfer problem alone. Blogs, wikis, podcasts and more can all be used to provide more flexible and convenient ways to capture the tacit knowledge of experienced workers in a format and easily accessible and informal style for younger workers to use.
Virtual workforces can also be greatly aided by social computing by promoting informal dialogue between people which can lead to great ideas. In a similar way to how sites like Facebook provide a means to support relationships, maintain contact, keep up-to-date with friends and family and even set-up meetings, so too can this concept work for businesses.
A Networked Organisation
Younger employees that are now entering the workforce for the first time have a particularly networked view of organisations, partly forged by their use of social computing sites in their personal lives. The implementation of social computing in an organisation (using software such as Microsoft SharePoint 2010) can give these employees quick access to people and data that can make a difference to operational processes and customer engagement.
Social computing can also support the promotion of common goals in business enterprises while avoiding duplication of effort. This can lead to optimising the performance of teams by allowing unstructured communication which ensures more dialogue and authentic, spontaneous conversations.
Jason Glover - Jason Glover has worked in the marketing teams of major companies for over twenty years, including over ten years in online marketing ...
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