Social Business for the Enterprise

Effective teaming and collaboration using social networking tools is challenging but it’s become a part of our worker populations’ way of life. It is essential to determine what tools and approaches work best for the personality of your organization to create an effective social collaboration platform.

Microsoft SharePoint 2010 is one viable and popular choice for expanding the role of social networking within your organization. If you have already deployed SharePoint 2010, or if you are using an earlier version and you are considering adoption – many of the community-oriented features of this product are not yet fully appreciated.

The challenge facing many organizations today is to understand what your constituents are doing with your social networking applications, and to track participation levels, spot underused tools, and lay out strategies to increase usage. Viral growth is a myth; you need a plan to expand usage! Enable has worked with a variety of organizations in development of social networking platforms as well as in strategies for social business adoption. Enable assists with identifying collaboration opportunities, role profiles, channels, and content plans to deliver a collaboration design that will ensure adoption and foster productivity.

Plan

• Social Factor Benchmarking – Enable conducts a rapid (2-3 days) assessment centered on review of social engagement models within your organization and on identifying opportunities to improve the reach and connectedness. The output of this collaboration benchmarking is a strategic mind map and a go-forward plan in the context of leading practices. We will recommend specifics for your enterprise to improve the overall social factor of your organization.
• Social Tool Selection – We work with your organization to formulate and organize requirements for social business tools and assist in mapping to appropriate tools to best meet these requirements. Enable has experience in creating and managing vendor selection processes for a variety of organizations and we have a defined approach to ensure that requirements are met by a selected platform.

Design

• Enterprise Social Design – Designing a social platform or solution requires careful assessment of how the process or business problem will be most favorably impacted by social capabilities to deliver business value to the enterprise – not just “Facebook for the enterprise”. Enable will help design solutions that have organizational relevance and fit into your enterprise social model, using tools and frameworks that can be extended to meet future requirements. Teaming models are increasingly a part of an individual’s social collaboration way of life. It is key to determine what tools and approaches work best for the personality of an organization (age, roles, industry and collaboration history) to create an effective collaboration platform. Enable assists organizations in determining requirements, role profiles and process targets to deliver a collaboration design that ensures adoption.
• Social Content Model – It is essential to structure, tag and rate content to create social engagement through the variety of tools and content approaches available with social networking platforms. A well-defined social content model ensures that the right tools are being aligned with target audiences to achieve the most of an organization’s social strategy. An Enable difference is that we understand existing models and classifications to help organizations determine their best approach for migration to the social world.

  

• Governance Models – A social business model can become unwieldy and potentially very difficult for organizations to monitor and to manage the spread of social sites. Enable believes that a governance process should be instituted for social content as exists with other enterprise initiatives – and we can help you to create it.

Build

• Social Network Development – Enable has a strong application development history and employs rapid development approaches like Agile to engage stakeholders and deliver results quickly. The key to our development approach is that all involved can continuously see results before go-live so that changes or adjustments can be made long before there is significant project impact. Our experience includes both development of large social networking sites and the delivery of organizational tools on platforms like SharePoint.
• Collaboration Tools – Enable has a history of delivering Microsoft SharePoint and other collaborative solutions. We have designed and rolled out SharePoint infrastructures and built application for a variety of organizations. SharePoint 2010 introduces a full set of social features including My Profile, activity feeds, tagging, and status feeds. Existing SharePoint implementations will need to effectively migrate current site and collaboration design to the new profile-centric 2010 social functionality. Enable has a deep understanding of SharePoint 2010 and how to utilize its new set of social capabilities.

Sustain

• Social Monitoring Services – How does an organization monitor its social network once rolled out? What is getting posted on blogs and microblogs? How frequently is content being updated? Are there any negative themes? What is occurring on our corporate social infrastructure? Enable offers ongoing support and monitoring services to allow organizations to relieve the internal burden and rely on Enable to manage the process.
• Social Analytics – defines a new business intelligence discipline to extract key data gathered using your organization’s social toolset to capture poll results, posting volume, topic-based references and activity, connection timings, etc. Social analytics focuses on delivering a view into how engaged participants are and what content drives the most interaction. Enable has a history in the design and development of executive dashboards across a range of industries and metrics. We can help you understand your visualization needs and define concise dashboards that map to these requirements.