Why The Vast Majority Of Enterprise Social Collaboration Initiatives Fail

According to Gartner, the reason why this happens is lack of purpose.

So many organizations want to implement a social collaboration strategy. Problem is that they think: “People will pick it up”. “This is gonna be a success! Well not actually. ”Provide and Pray” approach has just a 10% success rate.

So, if you want your social collaboration initiative to show business value you’ve got to work on an actual Social Collaboration Plan and follow it.

“Social collaboration efforts are a challenge for which enterprise architects are well suited, as these practitioners are often cross-disciplinary. They are able to work with social initiative leaders to define community purposes and condense these purposes into a strategy or road map which they can use to guide project teams during implementation.” said Anthony Bradley, group vice president at Gartner.

Enterprise architects should begin by helping organizations identify and define, at a high level, the target community for social collaboration. Having defined the audience, they should then identify the nature of the collaboration and the desired business outcome.

Enterprise architects can help an organization evaluate the relative strengths of purposes and sequence their integration into a social collaboration initiative.

Here are five characteristics of a good purpose:

• Participant magnetism: The purpose should naturally motivate people to participate. This is the “what’s in it for me” characteristic. Users should easily grasp its importance and the value of participating. The purpose must have meaning to the participants, and build within them a compelling need to participate. If you have to create interest among users, especially through costly incentives, you’ve chosen the wrong purpose.
• Community draw: The purpose must resonate with enough people to catalyze a community and deliver robust user-generated content. The best communities are heavily unbalanced in their two-way approaches, meaning that the community contributes far more content than the supporting enterprise. Find out how powerful the purpose is for drawing in significant numbers of people and contributions.
• Organizational value: The purpose should have a clear business outcome. This is the “what’s in it for the organization” characteristic. Choose purposes where organizational value can be clearly measured and shared with the community as feedback and motivation to continue participating.
• Low community risk: Choose low risk over high reward. The purpose, especially early in an organization’s social application maturity, should be low risk. This overall characteristic derives from four types of risk:
  Culture risk is the risk that the corporate culture is not conducive to mass collaboration.
     Adoption risk is the risk that people will not be inclined to collaborate on this subject or in this community.
     Information risk is the risk that the community’s shared information will be sensitive in nature.
     Result risk is the risk that, even if a community forms, its interactions will not bear fruit.
• Promoting evolution: Select purposes that you and the community can build on. Determine the dependencies between purposes. Some purposes have a more natural tendency to lead to others and to facilitate emergence, while that others are more subordinate. Those that have no dependencies but can lead to other purposes score higher.