When Your Enterprise Customer Asks About Social Software Governance

Jennifer Okimoto is a social computing evangelist and management consultant for IBM Business Consulting Services. As you can imagine, she's very experienced in working with large companies in the implementation of large-scale software.

On her blog, she recently posted a great piece about the issues of social software implementation and adoption. Specifically, four questions that relate to governance issues.

In this post, we want to highlight the questions and highlight her responses. We'll then examine one of the questions in greater depth.

1. How detailed should social media guidelines be?

Jen recommends keeping the guidelines simple, clear and few. Too many rules will result in employees not reading them. And guidelines are an overarching set of principles and behaviors, not a codified set of rules.

2. When introducing social media into the workplace, how do we address HR concerns about reduced employee productivity?

Her answer is one that we share as well. Employees are simply transferring activities to social media that they have always been doing offline:

• Searching for people
• Connecting
• Sharing
• Conversing
• Researching

We're going to explore this one a little further in a moment.

3. How do you guide employees or manage employees in navigating the gray with respect to posting content that is or is not appropriate in the work environment?

Jen offers a good perspective here. The community is very good about identifying these types of posts and responding accordingly. For posts that are clearly beyond questionable-for-work territory and are solidly in an offensive zone (e.g. racist, sexist, xenophobic), company management shouldn't hesitate in removing them. And deal with the employee through regular HR policies.

4. What about content that falls squarely in the HR domain? What if employees use social media to publicize HR issues, or to "supporters" to their cause?

Jen notes that IBM generally is hands-off with regard to what employees post. This particular issue hasn't happened. But she stresses that so long as everyone is respectful, the conversation can carry on.

Improving Employee Productivity

We have long maintained that usage of social software will improve productivity, not reduce it. It's the same content, conversations and ideas that employees have always had, but now put into applications that allow:

• Broader participation: more viewpoints, ability to tap the right information
• Findability: when you can find the person or information you need quickly, you're going to get things done faster
• Stronger connections: strengthen and diversify your internal ties, avoid receiving redundant information from just your in-person connections

For the final word in this post, we turn to Intel corporate blogger Laurie Buczek. In her February 13, 2008 post Why Intel is investing in Social Computing, she writes the following:

The average Intel employee dumps one day a week trying to find people with the experience & expertise plus the relevant information to do their job. We have calculated some of the $$ impact due to lost productivity & opportunity.  Let me just say that it is motivating us to take action.

Good point. Social software is about improving productivity. Keep that in mind when it comes to governance and enabling open employee participation.

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How large do you think a company needs to be, before this kind of software is relevant? A intranet among e.g. 5 people seems like overkill.

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