Intranet Change

Author: Toby Ward, The founder and CEO of Prescient Digital Media, and Social Business interactive, Toby is an internationally recognized and acclaimed expert in the areas of intranets, enterprise technology, intranets, and social media. Among his many clients are Harvard, HSBC, Mastercard, Nintendo, Pepsico, Sony, and many others.

Sometimes you get what you pay for, but money alone is not a panacea.

While the adoption of enterprise social media continues to grow, these tools continue to be poorly deployed and adopted, particularly behind the firewall on the corporate intranet. Executives are not happy, employees are less than thrilled and communications and social media managers are frustrated with internal social media.

Social media tools such as blogs, wikis and other vehicles are present on most corporate intranets: 72% have at least one social media tool available to some or all employees, according to the preliminary results of the Social Business Study (presently in the field, conducted by Prescient Digital Media), but the execution and supporting change management required to make these tools effective is lacking, or absent.

However, while many organizations have piloted or trialed, or attempted a wider release of some enterprise social business tools, most tools continue to be isolated and poorly deployed. All too often, free or vanilla solutions — often the out-of-the-box (OOB) social media solutions that are bundled with CMS or portal solutions, namely SharePoint 2010 — are introduced to employees with little thought for business requirements, user requirements and little or no change management.

Find the link to the full column in Communication World Magazine at the Intranet Blog