This is an update to an earlier post, which includes the slideset used at the Social Business event of 25th April 2012.

Creating the right environment for Social Business

Creating the conditions for a successful Social Business requires a strategic approach that focuses on establishing clear business objectives and strategies, understanding cultural considerations, developing frameworks and managing processes that adapt to the changing needs of the organisation, defining systems of governance, and enabling emerging collaborative tools that integrate with existing workflows.

Despite the benefits of taking an overall strategic approach to collaboration efforts that mix both structured and unstructured methods and techniques, many organisations are using emergent collaboration tools in an ad-hoc and tactical capacity that disconnects users from the other parts of the organisations and perpetuates siloed functions, groups, and people.

Clearly, Social Business is in an early market with much work to be done. However, steps can be taken to adapt to this newer way of working. In the area of adoption, organisations need senior leaders to champion and model the technology; to provide education on the benefits that can materialise from emergent collaboration – for the organisation and for themselves; to keep the lines of communication open, online and offline, horizontally and vertically, creating a more ‘networked’ approach to the internal company; and last but not least, to integrate collaboration tools into the day-to-day activities and workflows of its employees.

Organisations in the vanguard of emergent collaboration must continue to monitor, evaluate, and adapt to changing conditions. The benefits of emergent collaboration can be fully realised by taking a thoughtful look at all parts of the organisation, the business drivers across each department and the organisation as a whole, and the user types involved, all the while communicating and collaborating with all users in an open and trusted environment.

This will demand leadership’s decision-making and accountability as well as significant effort and responsibility on the part of all, however, the end result is a shared and aligned understanding and far more engaged workforce.

Slides used at the “Creating the Conditions for Social Business” event, held at the CBI Conference Centre, London.