The Promise of Social Media

In 2002, I became involved in the analysis of existing Open Text ECM installations.  During the subsequent 7 years, I had opportunities to talk to many of Open Text’s customers and the users of Open Text technology about user experience and the ability to find and retrieve information from these systems.

The user communities I spoke to expressed dissatisfaction with their existing Livelink systems to a level sufficient that ongoing enterprise rollouts were being slowed down and system upgrades were not being funded.  The analysis that was done by me and various other OT consulting, sales, support, and development personnel resulted in significant changes being made in the Livelink user interface.  But, even with these changes in place, there were still significant levels of dissatisfaction with the system.

These ongoing issues, issues that we continue to hear about from active users of Livelink, can be summarized as follows:

• A well organized ECM system can be used to find documents but the meaning of documents, why they were produced, what context they should be used in, or whether they represent current thinking is normally not available.  People need to find the expert(s) associated with the content which is difficult in large, distributed, organizations.  In less organized ECM systems this problem is only exacerbated.
• Good use of metadata to describe documents is normally the exception rather than the rule.  Even when this is done, metadata alone is insufficient to fully explain the content that exists and how best to use it.  Staff turnover, organizational restructuring, mergers, staff retirement, and downsizing has resulted in huge volumes of content being maintained with little understanding of what it is or how to use it.  Since ECM systems aren’t used to capture the discussions and tacit knowledge that explains the content, meaning is lost.
• With the trend to create functional teams based on expertise rather than geographies, increasingly people find themselves working on a virtual basis.  Since the collaborative capabilities of Livelink are too difficult for non-technical people to easily pick up and use, most people revert to email as their medium for sharing of experience, opinion, and ideas.  But, because email provides no commonly available medium for sharing ideas beyond the message participants, important information is lost to the organization.

Today, the rapid rise in the use of social media applications like Facebook, Linked-in, Twitter, Delicious, Slideshare, and others has demonstrated that applications like this can build million+, collaborative, user communities with the ability to share significant amounts of information without training or structured deployment.  These systems are there and people just use them to find information, build like minded teams, and create new knowledge.

Bringing social media capabilities inside the firewall is becoming a necessity as users become increasingly more accustomed to this form of interaction because:

• Next generation employees (Gen Y) expect to have these networking productivity tools suited to their on-demand, self-service approach to accessing information, interacting with people, and build communities of like-minded peers.  This is how they have learned to work and interact.  Already, companies are seeing the lack of this type of capability appearing in exit interviews.
• The critical information generated by organizational subject-matter experts or defined by project teams is hidden in email.  Moving this content into social media based discussions, Blogs, Wiki’s and documents linked to people makes information accessible to a wider network of stakeholders and enables new employees or team members to quickly get up to speed.
• Studies of typical ECM implementations have found that ECM repository search engines are used by only 10% of users.  Users who don’t immediately find what they are looking for by navigating a folder structure, pick up the phone and call someone who they hope will know where to find what they need.  Social Search linked to legacy repositories allows for content to be found by finding the people and expertise that content is linked to.
• Building peer communities that bridge organizational hierarchies has always been difficult to create and maintain.  In dispersed and virtualized organizations this problem is only worse.  By encouraging social media based collaboration, the very basis of what forms an organization’s corporate memory, the content, context and discussions that lead to decisions and actions, can be captured in a way that has never before been possible.  The tacit knowledge and information that is critical to business continuity and shared understanding is now captured by being able to show the context (tacit knowledge) of the documents (explicit knowledge) that have been produced.
• Micro-blogging and smart handheld device-based applications provide a mobile capability for information sharing that allows for the fluid capture of information from a growing mobile workforce.  Social Media applications made available to mobile workers means that the critical contextual information that is created and shared in the course of day to day business activities is consistently captured regardless of time or location.

Though Social Media applications focused on intranet based, secure collaboration, are appearing and these kind of capabilities are consistently being added to corporate intranets, this not just a new application.  Social Media is the natural next stage of ECM evolution.  For the first time, we have a capability that more closely parallels how people want to share information.  A capability, based on the explosion of Web 2.0 use on the internet, that can grow as organically as email use has grown.  More importantly, we have a method for the first time to more richly share information within the organization and achieve what ECM applications have offered but which have not fully delivered.