Enterprise Microblogging
December 18, 2008 by Raj Sheelvant
There is lot of talk on how Twitter and other kinds of microblogging tools are making on to the enterprise level. Ed Cone, at CIO Insight in his blog titled ‘Enterprise Twitterring Comes of Age’ points out that for some smaller companies, Twitter as a sales/promotional tool could be invaluable.
Similarly Chris Poley in his blog at Internet Evolution titled ‘More Microblogs Graduate to the Enterprise’ writes that Microblogging can streamline enterprise communication and notes that “Microblogging is no longer restricted to the social butterflies of the Internet, who channel their thoughts through such social networks as Twitter, Pownce, Digg, and Jaiku. Through the evolutionary process, enterprises are taking advantage of this Internet-fostered medium”
Authors of Mashable article ‘Is the Enterprise Ready for Microblogging Tools like Twitter?’, Aaron Strout and Joe Cascio talks about the business value of enterprise microblogging and I have listed them below.
1) Emergency Broadcast System: Microblogging helps any company to reach all of its employees quickly and efficiently. With many folks receiving hundreds of e-mails a day, it can take minutes if not hours before we get to an e-mail from the CEO.
2) Knowledge Management: As companies start uploading more and more content onto wikis, or central file repositories, these files can be linked to and indexed by conversational tools like microblogs and help manage knowledge
3) Training: By identifying a few key influencers and allowing new employees to see their daily “streaming,” information and best practices can be shared more easily and in real time with little burden on the “trainer.”
4) Expert Identification: Another area that many larger companies fall down is in making their resident experts easily findable. With microblogging it wouldn’t take long to figure out who knows what about whom.
5) Seeing the Connectors: Good companies spend a lot of time on succession planning. Unfortunately, most companies don’t have a good handle on who the true connectors are within their organization. By analyzing conversations and watching the conversations of employees, senior managers can easily identify who these connectors are and then ensure these employees compensation and titles match their internal value AND start to add additional connectors if too much information is flowing through any one individual.
6) Inclusion of External Stakeholders: Back in the early 2000’s, extranets were all the rage. There would finally be a way for companies to include partners, investors and even certain customers in their daily conversations. Portals obviously began to fill this roll to a degree but none were ever truly conversational. Enter enterprise microblogging with the ability to include these aforementioned stakeholders in the mix.
These are good ideas where authors think microblogging could be a good solution. But do we need to have microblogging to solve the corporate issues listed above? For most of the issues listed above, organization’s culture is more of a hindrances. Changing the culture of the organization which incentives the employees to behave in certain way is far more important in solving the problem than implementing microblogging. Sometimes, for some of the organizations the solution might be far simpler. So, I am still not sold on the business value of Enterprise Microblogging. I think enterprise microblogging may make some sense to small technology entrepreneurial companies that are starting out to help them deal with the growing pains. We have to remember that microblogging is a ‘tool’ that will help management of the company. Well established companies that already have proven management techniques established have to overcome cultural impediments that support the existing management style. They need to look at a quantified business value before jumping on the band wagon of implementing microblogging at enterprise level.
Embracing disruptive technologies that enable management of companies (microblogging in this case) just because everyone else is doing it is not value added. What’s value added is the ability to understand the strength of the new technology and its alignment to the ‘real’ business need. If the tool does not make companies nimble, increase productivity or reduce cost, not matter how ’sexy’ the new tool is going to be its not worth implementing it.
This is the where the role of IT Strategist becomes important.
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