Enterprise Social Media (ESM) is quite the hot ticket at the moment. Why email it, when you can Slack it? Not content to see their monopoly on business messaging fade, Microsoft have got into the act with their Teams product, hoping to dominate the social media space like it did in email through its super successful Exchange Server. Google, Zoho, Tibco and many other vendors are also contending.
The source of all the excitement is that businesses feel that they might have stumbled across a way finally to remove the email monkey from the backs of employees: the tyranny of the inbox is by far the biggest frustration felt by our clients when we conduct Digital Surveys. ESM seems to offer a way for employees to connect outside traditional departmental silos, becoming more productive as irrelevant information is screened out and their colleagues are only an instant message away, no matter where they are in the world.
At least, that's how it starts: soon, the familiar sense of overload creeps up, as the benefit of having employees at their fingertips is wiped out by the stress of being at everybody else's. What's worse is many of the apps will employ different "gamification" techniques to increase user interaction, prompting content for its own sake, further overloading those at the other end. This should not be surprising, as although the enterprise has swapped the dull corporate email interface for one with emojis and West Coast Kool-Aid, the underlying premise remains the same.
Due to the shortcomings of business systems, employees have got used to the fact that if they want to know something, they need to ask someone. Due to the absence of a single information map, people need other people to help find their way through thickets of departmental data, each incomprehensible to the other. Thus, users are bombarded with requests for their thicket, frustrated by delays in their own requests in other thickets, and overwhelmed with updates about what's going on, "just to keep them in the loop". Whether you're using an email inbox or a slack client in this exhausting game of message pinball is irrelevant (indeed people are using both, which doubles the exhaustion).
OK, I hear you say, how can that possibly be improved? It's a fact of busy corporate life. Actually, there's plenty that can be done to improve things, and it starts with learning from the past, something us techies are not very good at. Once upon a time, there existed in offices such a thing as a "File" - for a client, a project, etc. That File (for it was a proper noun...) was the single version of the truth for a particular subject, that sat in a single place. It was where any updates on the subject were filed. So, not only could you see history on that subject that pre-dated your arrival at the company, you could find things that you weren't looking for. The advent of email destroyed this content integrity, moving instead to using messages to achieve the same thing. If you question why that is such a bad thing, just imagine be at a busy railway station in sealed room, with only the tannoy to help you keep track of the comings and goings. Try writing it down and comparing it with a number of colleagues who were trying to do the same thing - with predictable results in inaccuracy and blood pressure.
Clearly we cannot go back to having a single paper File. This is where ESM properly comes in: for File, think Wall. Rather than map your ESM instance to people and groups of people, you map it to your information. Thus things are updated, not people: employees choose to follow the bits of information that are relevant to them - marketing presentations, cash management processes, UK clients and so on. That way they are in control of what they follow, and when they see it: newcomers get the history, and the business gets a single view of their most important subjects.
Ironically, none of the vendors (except perhaps Tibco) have cottoned on to this yet, but all of the apps mentioned here can function perfectly well in this "Note to File" mode. How do you get from message frenzy to this Wall karma? The single most important step is for a business to recognise it needs to orientate itself around its information, not the other way around. Once that is accepted, it can begin to build a universal map, with commonly understood nodal points for clients, products, processes, etc. Give each nodal point a wall and you're cooking on gas.