There are inherent challenges in adopting Enterprise Social Networking (ESN) within an organization to manage organizational knowledge. However these challenges could be managed using certain best practices which need to be adhered to ensure adoption and smooth roll out.
Computer 10: Lesson 10 - Online Crimes and Hazards
Enterprise social network challenges & best practices
1. Best Practices
Challenges and Best Practices for
Knowledge Management using
Enterprise Social Networks
Enterprise Social Network Adoption Challenges
and Best Practices
2. Best Practices
Overview
Most enterprises looking to deploy Enterprise Social Network Platforms are extremely cautious about adopting one. The main
questions that emerge in their mind are:
1. What if this becomes a platform for grapevine or gossip instead of productive and professional activity?
2. How to control or monitor the enterprise social media conversations in a open and professional manner without invading
privacy of an individual at work place?
3. Should we push the social collaboration or shall the business let the social conversations happen on their own and remain
unseen without nudging the collaboration in the work place?
4. How will we control or report abuse as and when it happens? What if this snowballs into a contractual or political issue?
5. Can company secrets be leaked? Invite law suits or similar such events?
The list goes on and on....In most cases these concerns are not as big as they are made out to be. However these continue to
remain challenges for adoption of the Enterprise Social Networks within businesses as a means for Better Knowledge Management.
Challenges
There are several challenges faced by Management while deploying Enterprise Social Network patterns for workforce. Most of these
challenges spiral into strong perception of deployment of Enterprise Social Networks being risky with potential to create unwanted
chaos. The message around how it can dramatically change the Knowledge Management culture is often hidden in the various
perceptions that are formed around its adoption.
Through this table below we have highlighted some of the challenges faced and why these challenges are more around the
perception instead of real risks or concerns.
Perceived Challenges Management may Why the risks/concern is legitimate but is more of a
face while deploying Enterprise Social perception and can be mitigated by understanding it clearly
Networks first before Best Practices are applied.
Inappropriate content and abuse on the Internet is anonymous. One can be who they wish to be. This is
social conversations enabled in the not the case with Enterprise Social Networks and conversations.
enterprise
1. Identity is revealed in case of a Business social network
that ensures that User identity is visible and managed
correctly
2. Within the business community a form of "Self Policing"
emerges and becomes the norm that allows offensive
comments to not only be spotted by others but acts as a
deterrent for any trouble makers.
3. In business social network the formal managers and
leaders also participate. This automatically ensures that
the followers are aware of being monitored and counseled
in case they over step.
4. Younger workforce is social media savvy and learning
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3. Best Practices
slowly how to behave on social media. The same
consciousness is carried over to social networks.
Content is inaccurate 1. As long as the content put by employees and leaders on
enterprise social network is open for scrutiny chances are
that inaccurate content will be spotted much sooner and
pointed out by other work force.
Content that is put on social wall
conversations even though it is 2. However it is important that some form of workflow or
moderation is also put in place for document posts, audio
professional activity and inappropriate
and video initially so that the message is clear that
may be inaccurate representation of
inaccurate content is being watched.
facts and can either confuse or mislead
the work force.
Too much transparency 1. This is very much a legitimate concern but transparency
can be managed well and can lead to a strong brand and
There are often concerns that too much perception of a open and transparent organization.
about the company and its policies or
day to day decisions is "going out" and 2. Educating the workforce clear non negotiable when it
comes to posting company documents or information can
can lead to too much transparency and
be outlined by HR teams.
problems in workplace because of it.
3. Managers and Leaders are also part of the social
conversations and can monitor any violations and raise
and counsel over a period of time to minimize such
occurrences.
4. On the contrary, the transparency and social chatter
around HR policies or similar other events is a great input
to Management provided this is reported, understood and
responded positively.
Insufficient Facilitation of Participation One of the main challenges is also that management is not
(By Management) equipped to encourage or foster participation.
Management needs to work with employees in terms of
communicating that the Social Network deployment is not just a
new technology development but also a new way or culture of
doing daily communication and participation.
Management needs to be involved much more heavily in declaring
and nurturing Communities of Practices (CoPs) within the
business.
High Barriers to Participation (By High barrier for participation means that people do not easily
employees) contribute to online discussions and share their knowledge
publicly.
There are multiple reasons for this kind of behavior: not being
used to using one’s own name in online communities can cause
shyness, and the communication culture of the organization may
be too formal and hierarchical to allow for low-barrier
contributions and unstructured participation.
The most important reason for having a high barrier for
participation, however, is the fact that the participation is not
encouraged enough by the platform, the content or effective
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4. Best Practices
community management.
Management must make sure that employees have clear
understanding of their own rights and responsibilities as active
A users of the new systems. lot of
the
concerns related to risks of Social Media are legitimate concerns but these risks and concerns are actually on closer view much
unfoveral reasons for this:
Best Practices
Integrate Social Network into Business Ways of Working
The Social Network should not just become a set of Wall posts and updates done by employees in their spare time. Actually the
Social Network has ability to replace in some cases existing processes or move along with the other existing business processes to
ensure better outcomes.
One of the simple use cases for this best practice is move of email communication to the social network thus reducing clutter. For
e.g. status meeting reports can simply be published as a announcement alert or wall posting to a large number of users instead of
a select few. This will involve entire teams and bring in a culture of openness visible within the workplace.
Make Reporting Abuse "Visible"
One of the most basic practice is to make it easy for the community users participating in a social conversation to report abuse to
moderators.
This is done by ensuring that reporting abuse feature is visible and promoted actively by business marketing teams and actively
talked about in the organization before the launch of the social network.
For e.g. while showing nested comments of a conversation an access Web UI button to report abuse around the comment made
with the Comment name attached will be very useful and give an impression that the business is monitoring and providing due
weight age to practice of reporting abuse.
Build a Abuse Monitoring Structure
In parallel to have a reporting abuse feature it is also important to draw in user community champions and provide a more "Self
Policing" flavor to monitoring abuse. Reported abuse features should regularly be monitored by the community champion members
and offenders counseled or in extreme cases disciplined.
1. Keep the community of self policing moderators fully represented from the workforce itself. Avoid managers or senior staff
that may not be actively participating in the social conversations in the first place.
2. Choose community moderators that can handle the issues with calm and have ability to counsel the staff if and when such
event occurs.
In terms of best practices any organization adopting Enterprise Social Network has to ensure following:
1. Make sure your organization is not only on board but knows where it's going and gets the kind of participation that truly
makes a difference in productivity, creativity, and collaboration.
2. Make sure the social media in your workplace has the same characteristics as social media in employee personal life
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5. Best Practices
Building Communities of Practices
Communities of Practices (CoPs) is a well formed Knowledge Management strategy.
Research conveys that many of the exchanges of practical information and problem-solving happened during informal gatherings
where experts of some topic of interest exchanged stories about their experience.
In CoP environments, novices could also consult with experts in a non-threatening environment. Through this process, gaps in the
practice were identified and solutions were proposed.
Individuals might apply the solution in their own practice, and the outcomes were fed back to their colleagues for further
refinement of the solution. Eventually these informal communications became the means for sharing information for improving
practice and generating new knowledge and skills.
Community relationships between different business practices should ride on the Enterprise Social Network Foundation. Following
concrete steps are needed alongside the Enterprise Social Network:
1. Identify and Form Communities of Practices within the business.
2. Promotion of Workspaces as Communities of Practices on the Social Network itself. These Sites may exist across functional
areas and reflect a particular interest area such as "Customer Service".
3. Enable automated wall postings whenever a new article has been added (as announcement feed) to promote the practice
area
4. Use Groups and discussions as a means to spread awareness and learning around a Practice Area.
Strong Moderation Capability
A business should assign a team of moderators for the enterprise social network to sustain and thrive. Initially it will be a new tool
for the work force to form communities of interest and exchange ideas and suggestions. Lot of these features are new to the
workplace. We need a team of moderators that can shape the conversations and evaluate whether violations are happening.
Also the moderation team can inject high quality content that attracts and encourages others users to contribute more to this
activity.
Linking with Outcomes
Ultimately the social conversations, blogs, wikis, posts to the social network in a business context must be linked to some outcome
that the business wishes to realize.
Shaping this is quite a challenge because more social networks have emerged from a personal context and most users would
naturally be inclined to keep conversations at a personal level during social conversations.
Shaping these conversations in such a way that they can be linked to a business event or an outcome requires moderators to also
take control and guide the social chatter.
Management can set goals such as "Implementing 5 ideas" this month from the workforce on better delivery of services to
customers. These ideas are then collected and put into shape as actual actions by the management team.
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6. Best Practices
"Measure" and Report Social Conversations
Management has taken a leap of faith when it comes to deploying enterprise social network within the business. Therefore a
mechanism to report social conversations and objectively view the insights that these conversations highlight for the business will
continue to benefit the business and will also help value the social network in the work place as a strategic tool.
The enterprise social conversations can be collected in the knowledge repository and using text and semantic analysis a better
reporting structure should be created.
For e.g. total conversations of a month can be analyzed and the overall "Buzz" at the work place can be articulated in the form of
reporting that measures different grades such as "High Morale" , "Neutral Feedbacks", "Growing Angst" so that these reports can
reflect the HR practices and influence any other decision making.
Make it part of Regular Employee Interaction
Equipped with better social network reporting, management and HR teams can engage employees in a very different manner as
today.
1. Collecting comments from audiences before a HR review cycle
2. Referring to specific posts or views expressed during Management catch up meetings
Suggest Tools
InfoAxon suggests following technology and tools to:
1. Assist in faster adoption of Social Network within the enterprise
2. Report Abuse and Monitoring of Social Network
3. Social Network Analytics Tools
"Pull" Tools and Techniques
Building Social Network for enterprises can benefit from "pull" created through a much more personalized and "Public Social Media"
look and feel. Employees that already access public social media sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr etc. are already aware
of Social Network usability patterns and features. It is easier to adopt enterprise social network technology that is similar in look
and feel or derived from public social network design patterns.
For e.g.
1. Interactive Chat can be added alongside Social Network to reduce the overall email traffic and create a major PULL factor
allowing users to integrate with existing Social Network Platform.
2. Rating features provided to contributors to rate documents and content shared through social media. This increases
participation and fosters self ranking of content by the community instead of through organizational workflows. These
ranks can be attractively tagged as "X people rated this highly with ranking XXXXXX"
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7. Best Practices
3. Provide attractive and useful personal productivity applications such as:
a. Weather
b. News
c. Subscribe to external web sites.
d. Links
e. Discussion forums
f. FAQ Knowledge Bases
Abuse Monitoring
Enterprise Social Network wall updates and conversations should be treated as "knowledge items" that contain snippets of text
conversations describing a state of mind or event. This is precious data which can be analyzed further for measuring and
monitoring abuse on the enterprise social network sites.
For e.g. using Web harvesting and Semantic programming techniques and open source tools it is possible to crawl a database of
the conversation snippets and updates and report through special keywords whether abuse is taking place. If such a pattern match
is found the moderators are alerted.
Using a rules engine and a "Abuse Dictionary" patterns will be matched and abuse reported and highlighted.
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8. Best Practices
Social Network Analytics
Social Network Analytics is a emerging science and analytical practice around data collected through social network patterns. There
are several ways in which this can be done and InfoAxon can provide add on plug-ins to achieve this.
1. Using Open Source tools such as Pentaho, Social Network analytics InfoAxon plug-in can be used to direct "Social Network"
activity feeds to analytical tools. Using these plug-ins these activity feeds are analyzed against a rules engine and:
a. Abuse, usability patterns, social media metrics can be measured.
b. What content is being shared and where (from which site and users) this is being shared with the social network.
c. How many "abuse" patterns are originating from each site and which site users are most "abusive" on enterprise
social network.
2. "Listening" platform and Dashboard that shows violations and activity feeds with such violations being trapped and shown
real time to the users. The Dashboard will consist of
a. Abuse reporting dashlets that allow administrators to view entire links of abusing content posted. Administrators
can then moderate and flag comment as abusive and remove it from the social network.
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10. About InfoAxon Technologies
InfoAxon is a leading provider of enterprise services and business
solutions powered by open source. We design, architect and support
complete “Enterprise Solution Platforms” using Open Standards, Web 2.0
next generation technologies and Open Source Frameworks providing
end-to-end solutions to business problems.
India’s First Global Open Source Integration Company
We are India's First Global Open Source Integration Company providing
business solutions in areas of Content & Knowledge Management,
Web2.0 Collaboration and Business Intelligence powered by our
unique open source ‘Platforming’ expertise.
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