Business Social in SharePoint 2013: Increased Production or Waste of Time?

Microsoft has added some wonderful Yammer social features into SharePoint. This is much like taking the communications and social development of Facebook and Twitter and slamming it into the business tools of SharePoint. A lot of arguments are surfacing on both sides of the collaboration space and I wanted to stretch my narcissistic legs and provide my own point of view on this.

I am in the middle. The social features are fantastic as a new line of communication and knowledge sharing. It is powerful for receiving different points of view on questions, issues or feedback. For those who use Facebook and/or Twitter, it is very familiar and it does not require an associates degree in computers to figure out.

A prime example of how social media can help solve business problems is in a Ted talk by Don Tapscott where he talks about how a company owner sourced socially a solution to his business problem.

 

I understand how business social can resolve problems in business. I also realize that it has the ability to expand communications into groups without a huge amount of effort. But when planning to implement a business social environment, also realize that the challenges come with it.

 

There are some myths wrapped around that I want to clear up. First is that this will reduce the amount of email you have to work through. For most organizations, this is the opposite. If you have alerts set up to notify you of relevant posted information, you will actually increase the amount of email you have to comb through. In order for this shift to take place to use social features instead of just using email for correspondence, everyone has to be on board. Of course you could do this one team at a time to attempt to provide a controlled change in business behavior, but if you think that everyone will "just do it", you may be in need of some prescription medication.

 

Second myth is that this will increase communications with each other. I love this one. People communicate differently. I personally never use the phone anymore unless it is to respond to email, text, Facebook, Twitter or Yammer. I know people who spend days on conference calls and if they are not in a conference call, they are in a conference room. Some people still carry around notepads and pens to take notes in meetings where I would rather open my laptop, OneNote and record the conversation while annotating white board items. In order for communications to change, people have to change. Organizational change management is very possibly the hardest part of implementing any new technology and if your plan is to just turn on the Yammer features and letting people go, you are going to have all new problems.

 

Knowledge management is just one of the challenges facing the additional social features in SharePoint 2013. by adding all of these new Yammer features, organizations are going to have to really address social media policies and how to handle that information. Information architecture will need to adjust to address this new platform of information and how to collect and store the information. What happens if you need to do an e-discovery on that social content and include it with your project?

 

Productivity impacts associated with social media will be realized in business social. Many organizations have had problems with people using social media instead of... doing their jobs. But is there really an impact? No different of an impact as your smartphone sitting on your desk. Companies can certainly curtail the use of social media tools by locking down the network resources, but they are hard pressed to lock down personal phones. So for many, there is already a productivity loss. Will the social media capabilities of SharePoint 2013 increase that productivity loss. In my experience, yes. But the rewards from the productivity loss outweigh the productivity time.

 

Some hidden rewards of using the business social features is education. I have seen the social tools being used to help provide tidbits of training into a normal workday. Someone asks and question on how to group a list view by content type and 10 people learned the answer that they will use over and over again. Education through osmosis.

 

The business social features of SharePoint 2013 are not for everyone. In order to actually make it work, you need to plan out the delivery, manage the expectations, plan the contingencies, and train the end users. If you manage to do all of this, it will increase productivity, if not... well...