An internal social software roadmap

When social software is introduced for use within an organisation it improves organisational capability but the type of organisational culture that exists also affects the uptake of social software. Here I present a way of dealing with this catch-22 by matching relevant social software to different organisational cultures.

I was lucky to hear Peter Duschinsky talk recently on his book, The Change Equation, and realised he was sharing ideas that helped explain the issues of adopting social software within the organisation. He asserts that change projects that fail to deliver their intended results, (estimated at more than 70% failure: McKinsey & Company Global Survey, 2008 N=3199/ Hamlin 2001), happen when organisations don’t have the ‘capability’ to cope with the change they desire. Capability is explained as a balance between cultural maturity on one hand and process maturity on the other.

Peter goes on to identify nine levels of cultural maturity and outlines a route map to improve an organisation’s capability by progressively stepping up these cultural levels.

We know that social software can help an organisation to climb up these cultural levels, microblogging, blogs, discussion forums, wikis, question and answer facilities, embedded application feedback, all improve culture. They’re brilliant for just-in-time learning, for emancipation of knowledge, for bypassing organisational hierarchies when they’re not relevant, for encouraging participation, for enabling staff as content producers, for gathering feedback, and spreading ideas.

But introducing social software is in itself an organisational change, it involves sponsors, infrastructure changes, new technology, learning, adoption, etc. For this reason it is subject to the same issues of failure as any change project. Peter also outlines how we risk slipping back down cultural levels if we skip steps, as they build on each other. So when is the right time to introduce what types of social software?

By introducing tools that align and match the organisations cultural maturity we can avoid issues of introducing a step change too much. This minimises issues of adoption, over-estimation of benefits, and general project failure whilst maximising the benefits from the social software itself and the resulting improvements in capability.

We can define appropriate social media tools for the level of culture within an organisation by matching the types of activity that are supported to those sought by that culture. Mapping this gives us a way of progressively introducing these new ways of working with minimum risk of failure.

This  matching method provides a roadmap to introduce social software based on your organisational culture. At the same time the new ways of working provided by social software act to strengthen culture so that the next level is more easily obtained. Each step also amplifies the organisations ability to accept change making each step progressively easier. Moving up this scale will help to establish a self-learning organisation that has the agility to manage proactive changes and hence open the door to more security and success.

Note that this roadmap specifically outlines the introduction of social software for use internally across the organisation. Many organisations are deciding to use microblogging to talk to customers within a very restricted team – this is a separate discussion and not what the roadmap above aims to advise on.

If you’re interested in more detail on the matching choices made for each step then please email me.

ben@cautionyourblast.com