From social strategy to social media
The Xpragmatic View #146
July 2, 2010
by Marc Buyens (@mbuyens), Xpragma
marc.buyens@xpragma.com
url: http://www.xpragma.com/view146.php
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In order to really achieve great things, we sometimes have to take a step back. We have to reconsider our options. Great things rarely come naturally. They are planned. The same goes in the social enterprise.
More than 10 years ago, Peter Weill and Marianne Broadbent wrote in their excellent book "Leveraging the Infrastructure" that in order to get to business agility, you needed infrastructure.
Infrastructure. At first sight, it is strange. Infrastructure is not exactly a word that we immediately associate with agility. Roads, bridges, harbours, airports... they all are things that cost a lot of time and money to build and that we hope will last for decades. They are not exactly "agile" things.
Yet, infrastructure also is what enables and facilitates interactions. In the case of Weill and Broadbent, the (IT) infrastructure would extend the reach and range of communications within the organisation.
Now, an interesting thing about infrastructures is that they are rarely a natural outgrow of the interactions that occur. Of course, existing traffic between two points might already have created some form of path. And very likely, the formal road that we will build will roughly follow this same path. However, while planning our infrastructure, we will reconsider the available options. We might build a bridge or dig a tunnel in order to shorten the distance...
Infrastructures don't come naturally. They are planned.
The same goes in the so-called social enterprise. In order to be successful with our enterprise 2.0 initiatives, we first have to plan our social infrastructure and that is something completely different than implementing a tool. The fact that we implement something like an "emergent social software platform" (ESSP), as Andrew McAfee likes to call them, does NOT give us a social infrastructure.
Social infrastructures are what Umair Haque describes in his post From Social Media to Social Strategy. Haque calls this a social strategy, but it essentially describes a social infrastructure: the rules of engagement, the mind-set of the organisation about the way it wants to interact with its employees, internally, and with its customers, partners and other parties, externally.
Define your social infrastructure and social tools will become the natural enablers for your plans. Start without a clearly defined social infrastructure, hoping for adoption, and you will end up with a dangerous narrow winding path to your destination.
And, as we once learned in a sales training, the greatest danger of such narrow winding path is that indeed, in rare cases, it reaches destination.
About Marc Buyens
Marc Buyens is analyst, management consultant and owner of Xpragma. He started Xpragma in 1999 after a 20+ years career in the IT sector. Today, he provides advice, training and mentoring services focusing on the intersection of technological evolution, organisational change and business strategy: a messy world of unfulfilled promises.
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