Social Computing: Transforming the way organizations function

(Diptarup Chakraborti is principal research analyst for Gartner. He has over 12 years of experience in marketing, advertising and marketing intelligence, of which the last 8 years have been within the IT industry.)

What if I told you today that in very near future you might stop using emails for official correspondence? Or that your employee records will not be saved securely in the company data centre but in micro site hosted by one Facebook? Sounds too far off the mark, doesn’t it? Well it could be sooner than you think. A recent study pointed out that 20% of business users will switch to social networking as the primary platform for business emails in less than four years. Needless to say, the impact on personal emailing will be far more profound. If emails, some thing which has become a part of our professional work can be impacted, imagine what can happen to other processes that we today take for granted. So let’s just examine some of the changes that might happen in near future with the increasing pervasiveness of social media.

We all have heard of twitter and its power to communicate. Now think of twitter in your office. Puzzled? Well, imagine the feedback that an organization routinely solicits from their employees to improve processes within it being sent through 140 characters or less using such micro logging sites created for the enterprise. Not only can it be seamless but also easy to sort, easy to respond and definitely faster to act upon. Organizations are now beginning to harness the power of social computing not only for external communications but to change the way they interact within it as well. It might be a novelty now, but it is catching up.

More and more people in India are using high end phones which now come inbuilt with applications to access social networking sites. Organizations are and will utilize the ubiquity of the hand held device to reach out and develop their brand internally. Similarly, processes are being developed to have your travel payment, information of transfers processed through social networking sites. Further more, large organizations are moving their intranet information on to such sites to create more engaged communities.

Many firms across various industries are harnessing the power of social computing to create engaged organizations. They have realized its networking potential and using it to create organization wide knowledge management resources to create, capture and disseminate knowledge and intellectual property across the organization. It works some thing like this. We all know that each and every employee creates knowledge in their day to day activities which more often than not resides in the laptops of the employees and rarely gets distributed even within his department, leave alone the organization. However, using social software tools like blogs, wikis or even tweets employees can be encouraged to post their knowledge which could be client related information or certain specific knowledge about their competitors on the knowledge repository, which is nothing but the intranet. Later, these tit bits of information can be collated and structured to create expertise which can then be used as competitive differentiators. For example, sales people who are on the field receive daily feedback on their products from both prospective and existing customers. Most of this is lost some where in the system. However, social computing can get these scattered pieces of information together seamlessly creating competencies across the organization. More and more companies are formalizing such knowledge management structures using the power of social networking.

The rapid growth of social computing is affecting certain key organizational functions and also changing the way employees respond to it. Very soon these functions will be completely be taken over and it’s better to be prepared for it right now.