Anyone considering social enterprise will likely wonder how they can determine if they’re earning a return on investment. Perhaps the most sensible way to approach ROI for social enterprise is to make sure its implementation serves specific business needs.
“Culture is our competitive advantage, and social is our enabler,” Don Pontefract, senior director and head of learning at Telus, a Canadian telecommunications company, tells SearchContentManagement.com of his organization’s use of social enterprise tools.
In other words, it’s about whether a company has a culture that is open and receptive to enterprise social networking as a means to promote collaboration and to connect individuals. Going a step further, our experts believe social must also align with business processes. Organizations need to create enterprise social networking tools that revolve around their document environment.
SharePoint 2013 does a great job within community templates of aligning the social dialogue with content and documents that people are using to accomplish their work. In that sense, organizations should think back to how they’re measuring productivity. What’s the output of what their workers are creating?
It can be many different things depending on the business and the industry it’s in. In a customer service environment, ROI might be based on how quickly workers can access content to improve response times. In a professional services organization, where documents are the primary work product, the ROI is probably based more on bridging the connectivity between employees to produce a document or to provide greater access to other experts.
For example, analysts at insurance provider Nationwide use several metrics to determine the effectiveness of their social enterprise tools and other collaboration solutions, the article explains. They look at how many employees have signed up for the system, how many are lurking and reading but not otherwise participating and how long it takes for questions to be answered.
Measuring ROI in actual dollar terms is more difficult, according to the article — completing a $1 million project using social enterprise tools doesn’t mean you get a $1 million return on social enterprise — so it makes more sense to measure whether it’s serving business needs.
The goals for worker activity and productivity can also help guide businesses trying to decide which social enterprise tools to use. For example, one of Yammer’s greatest selling points is that it’s very simple to use. Users need little or no training because resources are front and center in the user interface. With SharePoint, finding something isn’t always as obvious because you’re working with a larger enterprise platform that has a variety of purposes.
While SharePoint has made social feeds more accessible with the newsfeeds, they’re not quite as intuitive as they are in Yammer. In the end, Yammer might be the easier tool to bridge adoption, but SharePoint provides structure that more closely aligns with what people need to produce work products or to manage documents.
Source: SearchContentManagement.com, August 2013
