The 'Consumerisation of the Enterprise': A holistic approach to the social media generation

25th May 2010 - Consumerisation of the enterprise is driving a new wave of technology concerns, especially around social media. Manish Sablok, Head of Marketing, North Europe, Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, says that a holistic approach to social media that considers both customers and employees is the way forward. CIOs need to act now if they don’t want to see Facebook and

Twitter displace their corporate network.

The growth and impact of social media is all around us. It is being embraced by our employees and customers alike. And as more and more people are accessing social media through different devices – Facebook statistics show that around half of its 500 million members access the site from a mobile device every day - it becomes a more integral part of our home and our business life, and so access to social media networks becomes more critical.

Despite this surge in social media adoption, it is the area of biggest disparity between home and the enterprise. Recent Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise research shows that while 65% of employees use social media at home, only 32% can use it at work for professional purposes. However, in areas such as mobile web/email, instant messaging, presence, video calls and IP telephony, there is no more than 5% difference between home and work use.
Social Media Strategy applies as much to employees as to customers

Enterprises need a strategy for deploying social media, but they must remember to deploy their strategy across both business communications areas: customer-to-employee and employee-to-employee.

It is important that sites such as Facebook and Twitter can feed into customer services systems. Social media is not the silver bullet of customer service, but it is an important media that some customers want to communicate through – and definitely one through which enterprises can learn about their customers. It is important to listen to what’s going on in these highly collaborative channels, so that a business can prioritise actions and engage with customers. Then this information can be integrated into the enterprise as a whole.

Channels such as Facebook and Twitter provide valuable sources of information and communication with customers and prospects but they are not ideally suitable as enterprise communications channels, primarily because of security concerns. So enterprises must create their own internal social collaborating channels that reflect the preferences and practices that are prevalent in employees’ personal lives.

How? Well there are a multitude of companies now encouraging staff to use social media to collaborate: Asda operates its Green Room forum for 170,000 employees, and Virgin Media staff interact via wikis and blogs.

But a significant minority of employees say that they have the technology tools that they need to perform successfully. At the same time, 93% say that communicating and collaborating with others is increasingly important for them to be able to do their jobs. And when there are no company social media channels, employees will often turn to their more familiar tools, such as Facebook or Twitter, which undermines the security and management of the network and employee productivity.
Denial that these developments are going to impact corporate networks and communications is short-sighted to say the least. Companies should look to integrate their existing unified communications and collaboration assets like IM, telephony, video, presence and email etc. with new age tools such as wikis, blogs, as well as enterprise social platforms etc. This allows an employee to communicate through the channels that they are used to, via their company desktop, laptop or smartphone.

The employee engagement benefits to this unified approach are huge: it creates a community feel across the enterprise – both increasing morale and encouraging more collaboration – and it takes 'water cooler conversations' into the public domain, letting more people learn from what were previously private conversations, therefore leading to better and more structured knowledge management and collaboration.

People like what they know and use in their day to day life, and as smartphone adoption continues to grow, so does the consumerisation of the enterprise. As this new wave of technology expands – especially around social media – CIOs need to provide an enterprise alternative to their people now in order to avoid this new technology displacing their corporate network in the future.