Enterprise social networks (An Altimeter Report)

Moving social technologies from being totally outward focused towards customers and constituents to inward focused has the potential to provide amazing levels of value for governmental, non-profit, and regulated organizations. Altimeter’s latest report is on Enterprise Social Networks (ESN) from our own Charlene Li looks at how ESN’s can drive value inside the organization. Charlene did a great job in disecting what is going on around the adoption of social tools inside the organization, including:

• Organizations are measuring the wrong things. Organizations are focusing on measuring conversations instead of engagement and relationships. And relationships are the primary value drivers in ESNs.
• Free still has a home. Organizations are turning to free tools to test the waters of enterprise social. From the free zone, vendors are able to drive organizations to more premium products.
• Adoption long-term is still a question. Everybody is still very excited about social, but once it has been deployed in the organization and since IT no longer controls the digital kingdom, the enthusiasm wanes because of misunderstandings and lack of forced adoption.

Charlene’s analysis is directly relevant to government organizations, NPO’s, and regulated industries, and she provides four ways that ESNs drive direct business value – (1) Encouraging sharing, (2) Capturing knowledge, (3) Enabling action, and (4) Empowering people.

Altimeter provides all of its reports to the public under Open Research. You can download a copy of Charlene’s report here and see what Charlene has to say about it on her blog here.