Why Employees Don't Like Social Apps
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User Rank: Moderator
1/31/2012 | 10:22:49 PM
re: Why Employees Don't Like Social Apps
There are some good points raised in these comments:

1. Why should IT bother if its got mixed support from Execs
2. It's not really useful for some lines of business, but not mine

This is really where IT needs to leap in and lead. We've got a 15 year trend of personal adoption of technology outside the work. We actually help start the ball rolling with the advent of email (supported by Internet delivery) Almost nobody could get folks collaborating beyond email, we were hook.

The external social networking did the hardwork. Your staff knows what tweeting, following, updating, posting, and chatting all mean but they learnt it within the context of their personal live.

This is where Information Technology needs to lead. Figure out how to take these growing skill and leverage them to make you more competitive and prouctive. For example, A production team doesn't want to 'friend' each other, they want to work. Moving quality and production alerts out of email and into a portal where a 'twitter style' feed lets the see the status, as well as access documents, programs, etc.
User Rank: Apprentice
1/31/2012 | 3:20:48 PM
re: Why Employees Don't Like Social Apps
I work for an organization with over 30,000 global employees. I have a background in IT, but work on the business side now. I work in an area of content creation, rather than content consumption.

The company is rolling our SharePoint, but for my daily job responsibilities there is no use for it. A couple of years ago I found out about Yammer and joined the community for my company. I read the posts sometimes, but honestly for my daily responsibilities there is no use for it. It seems most of the posts on Yammer are from the marketing and sales departments, neither of which I deal with on a consistent basis.

My feeling about internal social networking, OK for sales and marketing but for everybody else ..... what's the point?
User Rank: Apprentice
1/31/2012 | 2:30:41 PM
re: Why Employees Don't Like Social Apps
Sure, "IT needs to get involved to make it happen." The question is, however, what incentive does IT have to champion a social app initiative that has only mixed support from senior management?
Justin Yuen
Justin Yuen,
User Rank: Apprentice
1/31/2012 | 12:17:07 AM
re: Why Employees Don't Like Social Apps
Great article whose time has come. I totally agree with the points raised. After the initial buzz around social enterprise collaboration platforms, you'll start seeing more rigorous analysis of the actual impact beyond vendor hype. To me, based on my experience after being in this industry since 2004, it's all about user adoption, knowing the use cases of individual departments, and offering both a platform that's simple to use with productivity features built in, in addition to services that make it easy for any group or IT department to generate adoption.

Here's my recent post on 2011's key moments in collaboration software, and trends for 2012 from behind the scenes:

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