Social Computing in Enterprises

2015

Table of Contents
1.

Rise of the Millenials and Social platforms.......................................................................3

2.

Enterprise Social Computing: Engaging the Gen-Y workforce...............................................4

3.

Key challenges and way forward................................................................................... 9

4.

Way Forward.......................................................................................................... 12

5.

References............................................................................................................. 13

Social Computing in Enterprises

2015

1. Rise of the Millenials and Social platforms

Millennials are people who are born between 1980 & 2000; they are also called as Gen Y
siblings to Gen X. Some of the attributes of millennials include tech-savvy, optimistic,
connected 24 X 7, Independent, comfortably self-reliant, goal oriented, self-confident, success
driven, life style centered, hopeful and many more. Most of these people are overeducated &
underemployed; 63% of have a bachelors degree and 48% of them are in jobs that doesnt
require a college degree [3].
With respect to the workforce, by 2025 about 75% of the workforce will be millennials. Among
existing millennials [3]:
1
2
3
4

70% have their co-workers and managers as friends in their Facebook profile
40% think that blogging about workplace issues are acceptable
56% wont accept a job in companies which doesnt allow social media access
71% of them dont always obey company policies.

With respect to mobility [3]:

1
2

69% of them believe office attendance is unnecessary on a regular basis

89% of them prefer to choose when are where they work rather than placed in a 9 to 5

3
4
5

position
45% will choose workplace flexibility over pay
56% feel technology helps people use their time more efficiently
41% have no landlines and reply on their mobile phones for communication.

Millennials are also very less loyal to their jobs. About 60% of them have switched their carriers
at least once already; 91% expect to stay in the job for less than three years.
Some of the statistics above creates the right picture of the kind of people we are talking about.
These millennials grew up with internet and consider technology as an extension of them. As
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more and more millennials are entering the workforce, organizations need to equip them to
satisfy these millennials workforce on the aspects mentioned above.
The challenge that organizations are facing currently is engaging this workforce in a productive
and effective way. Attracting and retaining the millennial workforce is also a challenge.

2. Enterprise Social Computing: Engaging the Gen-Y workforce

Enterprise Social Computing (ESC) could be a solution to address some of the issues raised
above. In essence, ESC is a platform or software which enables connecting people to people,
data to data and people with data within a corporate environment

[6]

. ESC places people at the

center and makes the day-to-day activities fun and social and thus engaging the millennial
workforce in a productive manner in an environment in which they could be comfortable.
There is a key difference between Consumer social computing and Enterprise social computing.
The objective of consumer social computing mainly is to make friends. However, the main
objective of ESC is to connect right people in the shortest possible time to get the work done. To
achieve this, organizations need to provide employees with tools to share knowledge and make
connections and to build relationships.
Couple of key platform (and not limited to) in the space of ESC is
1) Gamification platform
2) Collaboration platform
Gamification platform

Social Computing in Enterprises

2015

Gamification is the use of game thinking and mechanics in a non-game context to engage users
in solving problems

[9]

. Gamification had been used in the past as well to some extent in the

community spaces and forums. The idea then was to draw people into participation by providing
points. Now this field of Gamification has taken an entire new avatar. Enterprises off late are
embracing this methodology to engage with their workforce in the domains of performance
management, education and learning, reducing sales cycles and with their customers to increase
sales, gain loyalty etc. Lot of prominent companies like SAP, Microsoft, EMC, Deloitte have
started to use Gamification platform in different applications and processes to engage their
workforce in a fun manner [9]
Some of the case studies of implementing the Gamification platforms in enterprises are as
follows
1) SAP RoadWarrior [10]
This is a Gamification app used by SAP to engage with the sales teams of the newly acquired
company Sybase in the field of mobility. In order to get the employees of Sybase on-boarded
onto sales processes and also to get them to collaborate with the erstwhile SAP employees this
app was introduced. This app basically allows sales representatives to collaborate real time on
the various deals and customers. Sales representatives can open up conversations with their peer
colleagues on a particular deal and use their help to close the deals. The app rewards the sales
representatives who successfully close the deal and allow them to go to the next level to handle
much more complicated and difficult customers/deals. This app also provides visibility to the
sales managers to check on their teams on the status of the various deals and the pipeline. This
app is a perfect blend of social, collaboration and enterprise data. All the learnings and assets

Social Computing in Enterprises

2015

used in the process of closing the deals are stored in the knowledge warehouse which can then be
reused by the sales representatives for subsequent deals.
2) Ribbon Hero [11]
Ribbon Hero is a Gamification application created by Microsoft

[11]

. This was an app created to

make learning Office in a fun way. This app was first created and used internally for employees
to help them learn the various features of Office. Office as a product was created to make the life
of users easy to manage documents. But over the years, this software started to get complicated
with more and more options being added to the product. The help and documentation which was
always present was not extensively used and hence this app was envisioned to make the job
learning about Office features in a fun manner. Subsequently this Gamification application was
released to the public and is now extensively used in Office training programs. This app became
so popular the Microsoft Office team has also released a sequel to this app called Ribbon Hero 2.
In this example case study as we can see, the Gamification platform was used to increase the
users productivity by increasing his knowledge about Office as a productivity tool.
Collaboration platform
Collaboration platforms are software solutions that mix the aspects of social computing in the
work related processes. The concept of collaboration is not new to enterprises and has been in
used in the enterprises in different forms like blogs, wikis, communities etc. However with the
advent of different social platforms like Facebook, Twitter the key focus has shifted to the
persona and the relationships which were erstwhile missing in previous generation of
collaboration platform like communities. Solutions like Yammer and SAP JAM bring in this
people centric view in the space of collaboration within enterprises. Using these collaboration
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platforms employees can create an identity for themselves and foster the people to people
interaction to get the work done. These collaboration platforms are designed to break the silos
and bring people across silos and business in an organization to collaborate. The key aspect of
such platforms is bringing the contextual business information like the customer details from the
underlying CRM system to collaborate in the context of the customer to help participants to close
deals faster. Hence the collaboration happens in the context of a business problem with the data
at the center.
Weaving a holistic solution:
In the euphoria of implementing a cutting edge Gamification application or a collaboration
solution more often than not, enterprises tend to do too much rather than focusing on the goal or
the problem to be solved. Creating a Gamification application for everything and anything can
create a situation of problem of many with no concrete gains. The key focus should always
remain to foster people to people, people to data in order to achieve an underlying business
purpose like for e.g. to increase the number of deals closed.
Hence it is important for the Enterprise Social Computing solutions to weave an end to end
solution by bringing assets like people, knowledge and business information from the various
systems like corporate portal, business systems (like CRM, ERP etc.) into the context of the
application.

Social Computing in Enterprises

2015

As seen in the picture above, the erstwhile channel was for employees to search for the various
assets in the underlying corporate/business systems for information (as outlined by the dotted
curved arrows above). In this process if they are lucky they get the required information.

As seen in the above picture, the new renewed approach based on Enterprise Social Computing
is to weave a holistic end to end solution. In this case there are people to people, people to data
and data to data interaction in the context of the business problem. All this can be facilitated with
a carefully crafted Enterprise Social Computing solution.

Social Computing in Enterprises

2015

3. Key challenges and way forward

As any new technology or platform, social computing also has some areas of concern [7].
Governance & Security
Governance & security are the largest concerns in social computing. The millennial generation is
very enthusiastic about freedom of speech and opinions. As discussed in the introduction, most
of the millennials consider discussing about workplace issues is perfectly acceptable. But
however this may cause issues to the organization. To tackle this problem, the employees have to
be educated on the code of conduct in the social platform. Also, the blogs or public forums could
be moderated to avoid any kind of clashes among the employee groups in the virtual space [8].
The theme of social computing tools is to encourage personal and professional interactions.
These interactions potentially bring some of the private matters to the public forum. Some of the
organizations in highly regulated industries are concerned that information shared casually might
become part of company's archives which is subject to audit and legal discovery.
Without proper governance, some of the processes and company intellectual property poses a
significant security risk to organizations. This causes delay in implementing social computing
initiatives as the organizations wait for best practices in dealing with these issues before rolling
out social computing organization wide. Such security & governance risks also cause a vapor
lock between IT and social computing initiatives as IT department usually expects the new
computing applications to meet the requirements for governance & security standards.
Social media literacy

Social Computing in Enterprises

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In sectors other than technology where employees are typically not technology or social media
savvy, social computing initiatives may require more education on the usage of social computing
tools such as blogs, wiki sites, social information sharing etc. Social computing initiatives
require minimum computer literacy efforts by the organization to achieve effectiveness.
Measuring effectiveness & ROI of Social Computing
Social computing does not provide an immediate monetary return on investment. The method of
computing ROI for social media has to evolve. It has to cover not only the tangibles but also the
intangibles.
In a traditional organization, coffee table or water cooler discussions are one of the best forums
for sharing knowledge, resolving issues and getting help. However, in the generation of
millennials the interaction is more virtual. Social computing could be thought of as an online
water cooler where people meet to share knowledge and experiences. The sharing of the
knowledge and resolving issues are the intangible benefits of social computing.
The traditional approaches does not include social capital - conversations and knowledge sharing
with other workers in the organization. Therefore making a case of social computing with respect
to immediate tangible ROI is difficult.
Some of the quantitative measures can be adopted for measuring the effectiveness of social
computing. Social network analysis (SNA) could be used to measure distribution, connection and
segmentation. Through SNA, the most influential person in a network can be analyzed and if any
silos exists among different groups of people a bridge can be built among them to improve
connectivity. Some of the graphical tools like Gephi can be used for visual representation of the
social network of the enterprise.
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However, measuring the effectives qualitatively is a challenge.

Employee Education & change of mindset
Most of the employees have to be trained and educated about the new Gamification of
collaboration platforms. Usually this activity of training for Gamification or collaboration is
considered as a waste of time by senior management people.
Also, in any organization, people in senior management are the least users of technology. The
people who are expected to lead by example are the ones who have little time to participate.
Most senior
management show lack of engagement in social computing efforts. Since the main objective of
social computing is to tap into the intellectual surpluses within an organization, the lack of
support by the senior management will delay the adoption of social computing in the short term
within the organization.
Legal Restrictions
Many of the European Union countries have legal restrictions on usage of Gamification. For
employee facing Gamification platforms, employees should be informed about the intention of
game mechanics. Also since the employees' activity is being monitored, information disclosure
has to be agreed by the employees.
Some of the Gamification platforms act as data aggregators which could result in multiple legal
restrictions coming into the picture. Also Gamification may involve virtual currencies and virtual
assets, data privacy laws and data protection, and labor laws. The use of virtual currency is not

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regulated. The legal uncertainty surrounding around the virtual currency might cause problem to
the public authorities as fraudsters can use this for money laundering and other illegal activities.

4. Way Forward
Social computing can be considered as one of the mechanism for engaging the millennial
workforce. This should not be considered as a silver bullet for all the issues. Since the objective
of enterprise social computing involves improving the interaction experience among the
employees and foster knowledge sharing in a virtual place, measuring the ROI during the early
stages might result in misleading results and decide social computing as an ineffective tool.
Implementing Social computing can be successful only if the organization has a long term
perspective towards the benefits of social computing.

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5. References
[All references as accessed until 16/08/2014]
1. http://realtruth.org/articles/080804-002-society.html
2. http://www.business2community.com/social-media/digital-generation-millennials-socialnetworking-0737416#!bErf7J
3. http://badgeville.com/infographic/the-rise-of-the-millennials
4. Is Europe Ready For The Millennials? Forrester Consulting, November 2006
http://loader.eurorscg.fi/partner/xerox/Forrester_report.pdf
5. http://www.microsoft.com/enterprise/en-lk/it-trends/social-enterprise/articles/millennials-in-theworkplace.aspx#fbid=2M-DIJM1uPj
6. Enterprise Social Computing, Microsoft.
http://download.microsoft.com/download/8/C/D/8CD13B91-925A-4999-9975B087F79D7092/MS_Enterprise_Social_Computing_Whitepaper_Final_Oct11.pdf
7. http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe/tentopissuesinadoptingenterprisesocial
computing/581
8. http://www.ibm.com/blogs/zz/en/guidelines.html
9. Gamification - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamification
10.SAP RoadWarrior game:
http://enterprise-gamification.com/mediawiki/index.php?
title=SAP_Roadwarrior

http://vimeo.com/53538820
11.Microsofts Ribbon Hero:
http://blogs.office.com/2011/04/26/ribbon-hero-2-how-to-play-the-gamevideo/
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrFzGSZf_mg
http://www.ribbonhero.com/

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