I recently came across one of the most comprehensive studies on the impact of Social Media in organizations. McKinsey recently concluded the latest edition of their Global Survey (http://goo.gl/wjRqv) that surveyed over 4,000 executives across regions and industries and provides some very interesting insights on the use of social media in organizations. If anyone doubts the impact that social media will have on collaboration within organizations and in driving process improvements, I highly suggest reading through the details.
First and foremost, the survey reinforces two important factors around social technologies:
- in terms of benefits, 9 out of 10 respondents whose organizations use social technologies report some degree of benefits
- 72% of respondents confirmed that their organizations use social technologies in some form
When listing the top likeliest organizational changes resulting from social technologies in the next 3-5 years, in the absence of constraints, the following top 4 areas that were highlighted:
- The boundaries between employees , vendors and customers will blur (35% of respondents)
- Teams will self-organize (32% of respondents)
- Decisions will be based primarily on the examination of data rather than reliance on opinion and experience (32% of respondents)
- Data used for decision making will mostly be collected through experiments (20%)
When seeing these results, I would expect that most process improvement and organizational development practitioners would see the potential opportunities that such improvements could bring to organizational collaboration and process improvements. More specifically, the data based decision making and the piloting are definitely benefits that social media do bring in terms of rapidly testing ideas in the market (i.e. how Starbucks leverages social media in their product development lifecycle to test new ideas) and quickly seeking feedback from team members and customers on new ideas and concepts.
Many companies have already incorporated social media into their operations. At Intuit, makers of the software QuickBooks, team members turn to internal social media tools to source solutions to software problems from other team members. Employees at Dell use a platform called EmployeeStorm which surfaces ideas from all it’s business units and creates an environment where discussions can occur among it’s 80,000 employees. Topics range from product upgrades to process improvement opportunities. In other organizations, process improvement opportunities are crowd sourced and voted on by team members increasing the visibility of potential projects. Active workshops have also posed questions to the community eliciting assistance identifying process issues or potential solutions. Facebook and Twitter are now used as well to address customer support issues and also take feedback to develop an improved customer experience.
While the analysis clearly points to the fact that social technologies remain in their early days of adoption as capabilities and opportunities continue to evolve, it is somewhat disappointing to see how few companies leverage social media to help drive process improvements. In a recent iSixSigma survey, the same was highlighted when only 1-2% of respondents indicated that they leveraged social technologies as part of their deployments.
