CIOIN

‘The customer is king’ is so passé. The new business mantra is: The customer is king and he better be on your Facebook page. And as a corollary to that, your internal customers better be part of your company’s social media strategy.

That’s a reality Indian CIOs are beginning to realize. If they want to help their companies reach the next level, they need to harness people power for internal collaboration. Some are already on the path. According to CIO’s The Year Ahead Survey 2012, 24 percent of Indian CIOs are planning to implement collaboration tools for the enterprise in 2012, and 11 percent plan to do so in the next six months.

“The ability to share and disseminate ideas and information, review work processes and have absolute visibility into what’s going on in the enterprise—at one go—is too tempting an idea to ignore,” says Dhiraj Trivedi, AVP, revenue management and electronic distribution, Royal Orchid Hotels.

Mohammad Wasim, director and Global Infrastructure Practice lead at Sapient, agrees. 

“[Enterprise social media] is everything that an ideal enterprise should have. It’s replete with easily connected apps, and collaboration channels with the power to harness and harvest the possibilities of collective effort,” he says.

The New Need

How many great ideas can you recall that disappeared into oblivion because they were not actionable at that point, and lacked a place to hibernate until their time came? Now factor in the increasing number of people moving in and out of your organization. Where have all their ideas gone? 

Sebastian Joseph, EVP and Head Technology at Mudra Communications calls this ‘the loss of organizational memory.’

“Even the best of ideas need time to be nurtured. This takes time,” says Joseph. In the meanwhile, he says, e-mails don’t provide safe harbor for ideas. Neither is it the best communication channel to nurture ideas given the bureaucracy and lack of speed e-mail is associated with.

This is what’s leading more CIOs to turn to enterprise social media. These platforms, say a growing contingent of CIOs, also helps elicit more ideas than traditional ways of collaboration. “We have noticed that shy people are more comfortable sitting behind a machine and sharing ideas rather than raising questions during the stipulated time frame of a meeting,” says Wasim.

But enterprise social media is more than just a means to gather, store and nurture ideas; it can actually help drive business. At Royal Orchid Hotels, for instance, Trivedi empowered front desk staff by integrating the company’s enterprise Facebook and Twitter feeds into its Salesforce Chatter, creating happier customers, who return more often. 

“Now when a customer checks into any of our hotels, our employees know their preferences regarding food, beverages and other requirements,” he says. 

At Sapient, Vox (Latin for voice), Sapient’s social media platform, has ushered in a cultural change within the organization, says Wasim. “People traveling to other countries can now seek advice from colleagues who have been there about its work culture,” he says, adding that Vox is allowing staffers to collaborate and team-build even before they take off. 

That’s introducing some bottom line benefits. “We have noticed a significant change in people’s travel expenses and productivity gains,” says Wasim. 

Trivedi says that Royal Orchid’s enterprise social media push has increased efficiency. He points out how just by being able to assign, re-assign, and approve tasks on the move, enterprise social media has reduced communication cycles from 24 hours to two hours. It’s also given senior management the ability to assign tasks, and monitor which employees are working on it and how much progress they’ve made—all on a single platform.

Trivedi’s roadmap for Royal Orchid now includes using iPads or iPhones for meetings, where a PPT can be uploaded on Chatter so that even executives sitting at airports can attend a meeting through a conference call. “If an executive isn’t comfortable speaking in a public forum, he can raise his points via chat, which is a component on the same meeting screen,” says Trivedi.

Taming the Shrew

For all its benefits enterprise social media has its challenges. For one, it takes time to put together. Ask Joseph who built his social media platform in-house. He says he started sketching the outlines of the project two years ago. The project, which incorporates blogs, wikis, work groups, huddles and ideation apps and is designed to have a Facebook feel, is scheduled to go live in April of 2012. 

Today, the platform, which is in pilot, provides Mudra employees with a one-stop shop to create ideas, tag people, invite peers for group huddles, or keep tabs on tasks assigned to them and progress on a team project. Jospeh says that if CIOs want users to buy into such a platform, it has to work the way they want it to—a significant shift for CIOs who are used to top-down, centralized control of traditional software implementations.

CIOs also have to be on board with being in a perpetual state of beta. That’s because like Facebook, enterprise social media systems need to be highly iterative, creative, and with users driving most of the change and innovation. 

“Building an application like this needs constant renovation, in look and feel and new features, which might require considerable in-house skills—not just technical but creative as well,” says Trivedi.

Wasim advices CIOs to look for a person within their enterprises who can look beyond technology and into human behavior. “Companies that offer such tools have invested considerable amounts of time and research into understanding what works for employees,” says Wasim. “With feedback from your employees, you can integrate features to give them a more customized feel.” 

And that’s important because the customer is king.