Six Reasons Why Social Business Strategists should read Jacob Morgan’s “The Collaborative Organization”

I purchased Jacob Morgan’s “The Collaborative Organization” on Amazon UK at its full price.  “The Collaborative Organization” is a strategic Enterprise Social Software guide and a monumental must read for any CEO, CMO, CIO and CCO (Chief Culture/Customer Officer) wanting to successfully implement Enterprise Social Software within his enterprise.  Erik Brynjolfsson, coauthor of Race Against the Machine writes: “Most business leaders understand how critical collaborative tools are to the success of their companies.  What they need now is a guide based on hard data and practical experiences that show how to put those tools to work.  Morgan fills that need with this book.” 

“Rapid pace of change is occurring in technology, human behavior and business culture” writes Morgan.  It is imperative for organizations to check and if necessary update obsolete intranet/extranet platforms and radically transform internal and external communication.  Former Hewlett-Packard CEO Lew Platt once said:  “If only HP knew what HP knows, we would be three times as productive.”  Please bear in mind that Morgan has a full array of added case studies on his Chess Media Group website adding tremendous value to the study of his book.

 

 

1. Enterprise Collaboration Tools bring real advantages to companies willing to implement social business software solutions.

 

Among the top reasons for enterprises considering the implementation of Enterprise Social Software (ESS) Morgan’s top six are:

– Connecting colleagues across teams and geographies (72%)

– Increasing productivity (65%)

– Fostering employee engagement (60%)

– Fostering innovation (59%)

– Capturing and retaining institutional knowledge (59%)

– Enabling access to subject expert (54%)

Morgan uses many case studies to back up his enterprise social software exposé. 

 

2. Accelerate the serendipity of weak ties with the use of social business software solutions

 

“One of the most visible changes for companies is often how horizontal communications lines open up across various enterprise silos” writes Morgan.  He discusses the risks companies are facing by not implementing social software tools as well as the possible threats to be faced while implementing them.   

 

3. Excellent delivery of the technology landscape

 

Morgan’s technology landscape is a strategic overview social leaders will greatly appreciate when considering their social platform menu.  Morgan and his Chess Media Group have done a meticulous job at surveying all the different collaborating platforms, and the percentage of companies using mashups, wikis, blogs, prediction market platforms, forums, Ideation platforms, RSS feeds, micro-blogs, collaborative file sharing and social email and much more. 

 

4. Social Enterprise Software evaluation matrix

 

Morgan offers an excellent vendor evaluation matrix, which is very well presented and easy to use.  It will help social leaders to rank ESS vendors according to specific areas such as::

– Vendor management, product roadmap and viability

– Ease of use and intuitiveness

– Price

– Features

– Technology integration and security

– Customization and integration

– Product features: people

– Support and maintenance

– Vertical expertise

 

5. Adaptive emergent collaboration framework

 

Morgan delivers another useful matrix with five core areas:

– Goals and objectives (company, department, metrics, customers and employees)

– Organizational culture (leadership, mutually beneficial value, change management, openness and evangelists

– Process (escalation, information management, automation)

– Technologies (tool selection, integration, training, adoption, maintenance and upgrades)

– Governance (best practices, guidelines, employees, customers, metrics)

Morgan recommends a maturity model of adoption made of seven steps and the different milestones achieved during their implementation.

 

6. Culture and technology are the two most important drivers

 

Morgan stresses enterprise culture and how it is one of the most crucial pillars of Enterprise 2.0 when attempting to establish the right foundation for hybrid, intern and external communities to communicate and engage.  Morgan quotes Carl Frappaolo “Culture is the single greatest potential asset or detriment.  A culture conducive to collaboration will compensate to some degree for awkward processes and inadequate technology.  In contrast, a culture not conducive to collaboration will ignore, or in the worst case sabotage, even the most sophisticated technology and process approaches to open transparent sharing.”

 

The Chess Media Group has meticulously researched and produced a superb textbook for any CCO, CMO, CIO and CMO to assist him or her into implementing enterprise social software.   Morgan has delivered another crucial piece of the social business puzzle on how to prepare, organize, evaluate, measure and drive the adoption of social software tools.  Although Morgan has written a superb work, one frustration remains: the somewhat poor quality of the charts and figures as displayed by the publisher.  A little more effort could have been made in order to enhance this work.  The Collaborative Enterprise belongs to the text-books every social business strategist needs to own.  My personal thanks and kudos to Jacob Morgan for having published a wonderful book that greatly contributes to the new discipline of social business strategy.