Era of social business beckons

Less than a quarter of businesses use social networking or collaborative technologies to preserve critical knowledge, almost the same amount r use the tools to spread innovation throughout their organisations.

This is according to the findings of the IBM 2010 Global Chief Human Resource Officers (CHRO) Study, which discovered that as businesses continue to embrace social computing, enterprises face the dawn of a new era; the era of the social business.

Social computing consists of blogs, e-mail, instant messaging, social networks, wikis, social bookmarking and the like.

The research found more than 700 CHROs and executives from 61 countries believe that the Internet has changed the marketplace, with the integration of social computing into enterprise design representing an enormous shift in the business landscape, notes IBM.

“Social networking and collaboration are still regarded by many companies as a 'soft' skill,” says Howard Stafford, human capital management leadat IBM.

The study, however, suggests these softer skills can have bottom-line consequences. “For example, financial out-performers are 57% more likely than under-performers to use collaborative and social networking tools to enable global teams to work more effectively together,” notes IBM.

Most respondents indicated they frequently employ collaboration tools for more effective corporate communications and learning programmes, as well as to target and recruit external candidates.

Almost a fifth (21%) of the companies recently increased the amount they invest in collaboration tools and analytics, despite the economic downturn.

It also emerged that 19% of respondents regularly use collaborative technologies to identify individuals with relevant knowledge and skills, 23% to preserve critical knowledge, and 27% to spread innovation.

According to IBM, a social business enables its employees and customers to easily find the information and expertise they seek.

“We believe the most effective approach to enabling a social business is to help people discover expertise, develop social networks and capitalise on relationships,” says Stafford.

“It helps groups of people bind together into communities of shared interest and co-ordinate their efforts to deliver better business results faster. It encourages, supports and takes advantage of innovation and idea creation, and builds on the intelligence of the crowd - the collective intelligence of an organisation,” IBM states.

On the other hand, analyst firm Gartner notes that although social media usage in organisations is on the rise, many organisations do not have comprehensive governance policies in place for its use.

The analyst firm anticipates by the end of 2013, half of all companies will have been asked to produce material from social media Web sites for e-discovery - discovery in civil litigation which deals with the exchange of information in electronic format.

"In e-discovery, there is no difference between social media and electronic or even paper artefacts. The phrase to remember is 'if it exists, it is discoverable'," says Debra Logan, VP and analyst at Gartner.

Gartner urges enterprises to have an overall governance strategy for all applications and information, and this strategy should include content created on social media.

"Social media content is like all other content that is created by companies and individuals and is subject to the same rules, laws and customs," says Logan.

Logan explains that the legal landscape around social media remains a patchwork, due to overlapping, conflicting and contradictory laws and regulations. This is in addition to the procedural rules propagated by national and international legislative and regulatory bodies.

Since there is no guarantee of absolute safety, the safest option is to have a consistent policy and application, she says.

"Unique aspects of social media present additional challenges, but as with an overall information governance strategy, the key to avoiding or mitigating potential legal issues in the use of social media for business purposes is to have a governance framework, policy and user education."