Keg Stands, Ice Luges, and Social Business

It seems like just a few years ago (oh, it was just years ago) that social technologies were viewed as some temporary aberration of college students.  Kind of like keg stands or an ice luge (ask your kids). Well, wake up, social technologies have moved into the enterprise with a vengeance, and are beginning to transform organizational processes.

Consumer sites like Twitter and Facebook initially exposed organizations to the potential benefit of using social technologies as listening posts to the market. Many early adopters of social and collaborative technologies were keen to try out different tools and services to see how they might work in a business environment. These pioneering toolsets have now converged to a much more defined set of products and application areas, and an increasing focus on integrating social technologies into the core of business processes.

Organizations are now beginning to understand that true Systems of Engagement mean more than just this public veneer; true Systems of Engagement mean embedding social technologies in the very nature of how an organization operates. In just a few years, we will cease to view “social” as a separate layer from process, and the objective will be how to make the business itself social.

It is clear that the young professionals in our organizations -- those of the mobile and social generation -- view work much differently than we in the email generation do.  And if we are going to race with the machine rather than against it, if we are going to position our organizations for the future rather than the past, we best start paying attention to what they are saying.

A few months ago, Cisco did a very interesting report on what is going on in the minds of college students and young professionals. The Cisco World of Work Report was published in November 2011 and surveyed 1,400 college students (ranging in age from 18-23) and 1,400 young professionals (30 years old or less) from 14 countries.  

Now one can say, particularly if one is of my generation, “Who cares what these people want. Just suck it up and work the way we tell you to.”  But honestly, I don't feel that's the way to approach it.  If we buy the proposition that engagement is key to creating value -- and ultimately profitability and productivity -- then we really need to think about the social and mobile technology systems that create and foster engagement -- and how they connect back to the existing information resources of the organization.

So let me give you a couple of data points about how young professionals in the workplace view mobility and flexibility and social technologies from the Cisco report.

• 45% of young professionals would accept a lower-paying job with more flexibility rather than a higher-paying job with less.
• One in four young professionals say the absence of a remote access option for their jobs would influence their job decision. 
• 30% of young professionals feel that the ability to work remotely with a flexible schedule is a "right.”
• 77% of young professionals have multiple computing and communication devices.  33% use at least three devices for work purposes. 
• 52% of young professionals believe that they are not responsible for securing their work devices and data -- service providers and IT are.  15% of young professionals have had their mobile phone, laptop, or other devices stolen in the past 12 months. 30% have experienced identity theft at least once.
• 73% of young professionals access Facebook at least once per day.  70% of these have “friended” either their colleagues, their manager, or both.
• 68% of young professionals believe that company-issued devices should be available for both work and play.

So clearly, we need to think about how we engage this generation of employees differently from how we engaged the email generation. While deployments of social and collaborative technologies in a business context are still in their infancy, the data suggests huge potential benefits:

• 51% of organizations consider social business to be “Imperative” or “Significant” to their overall business goals and success.
• 38% of those organizations using some form of Enterprise Q&A or expertise sourcing get half or more of their answers from unexpected sources within the business.
• Within organizations using an Open Innovation social platform for ideas and suggestions, 48% have successfully surfaced major changes to internal processes, and 34% have come up with major changes to external product offerings.
• By using specific social collaboration between Sales and Marketing staff, the number of respondents reporting “poor sharing of knowledge and information” drops from 41% of organizations to 8%, and “poor working together” drops from 21% to 4%.

Social technologies are clearly on the way to becoming a digital dial tone in organizations. There is still huge resistance to these technologies, in this case not only from traditional IT but from business executives who believe that these technologies will result in the escape of corporate "secrets" and the death knell of employee productivity.  Sound familiar?  We all said exactly the same thing about the deployment of email and then internet connectivity to the general employee population.

The business needs to demand that we embrace social technologies as the future digital dial tone of our organizations. We need to understand that how the Facebook generation will expect to connect with their peers and customers is dramatically different from how the email generation did so.  We need to admit that email as a group collaborative tool (as opposed to a direct tool for one to one communication) is an abject failure.