How to make Social Networking work for Service Organizations

While Social Networking is getting into daily discussions everywhere, social network analysis is gaining acceptance as an effective organizational tool. However, there is still scattered knowledge about how to bring these two seemingly related issues together in organizations. This post summarizes and points out some new ways service organizations can capitalize on these trends to address new challenges.

Major challenges to service organizations
Today's service organizations are facing high demand for knowledge-intensive works. However, ever changing knowledge and skills in the service areas require organizations to maintain current business while learning and unlearning at an unprecedented pace. It is only efficient if organization members can together create and learn from their colleagues. In another word, service organizations need to retain talents and be learning organizations to be competitive in the long run.

This great challenge is complicated by the fact that service organization's workforce is often distributed in time and location. By the nature of service business, a part of the workforce is spending significant time on site, or working in time shifts. Many large organizations have branches in many locations, sometimes countries and regions. As works are getting more complex and demand becoming unpredictable, many organizations choose to employ contractors to gain access to skills and at the same time maintaining a certain number of employees for the stable part of the workload. Together with flextime, remote working and outsourcing, these factors make traditional learning and information exchanging methods ineffective.

In addition, high workforce turnover rate and aging population present the second set of challenge. In developed countries, aging population is a major issue for workforce. In the next few years, a large portion of the workforce in these countries will retire, but there is not enough young people to join the workforce. Together with talent retention, late retirement arrangement, companies need to ensure the knowledge transfer from old to new generations of employees. A side effect of this shortage is higher competition for talent, which bids up the salary and increases turnover rate. For example, according to US Bureau of Labor, the average national voluntary turnover rate between 2005 and 2006 was 23.4%, up from 22.7% of the 2004 to 2005 period. It worths to note that the number is higher in services industry than in manufacturing industries.

In India and China, the countries with 40% of the world's supply of labor, a small percentage of qualified labor also induces high turnover rate and salary inflation in service industries. In China, according to McKinsey, in 2005, IT service turnover rate is about 20%. The situation is worst in India, where the number is approaching 40% in 2006 according to Nasscom (India's National Association of Software and Service Companies).

How to capitalize Social Networking tools to enhance corporate social networks in service organizations

All the above challenges create a dilemma in today's service organizations, i.e. employees don't even know where to go for necessary expertise and information, not to mention to be aware of the existence other's new knowledge. Social network is the best way to complement formal reporting structure. Through social networks, employees can update information, find and gain access to expertise, and initiate collaborative efforts. Studies also suggest that spending small effort on social networks, especially network “brokers,” who serve as bridges across a number of subgroups in a network, can significant enhance success chance of change initiatives. Finally, social networks can also help to create shared mental models, which is one of the five key elements of learning organizations.

Social networking tools can extend the traditional mentoring and peering effort to enhance corporate social networks. To make it works, here are some recommendations to service organizations:

1. Create new communities by professional and person interests or simply common connections using proprietary or corporate versions of public social networking tools. While professional interest is important, connections created through personal interest or common connections can transcend the normal matrix structure and provide the most useful context for information exchange, innovation and learning.
2. Community-based "expertise locator". Using common collaboration tools, e.g. wikis, blogs, and social tagging and ranking tools, organizations can build a multi-dimensional knowledge base. Unlike traditional portals or forums, the tools can help community members to get to the most relevant and useful knowledge and knowledge owners using different criteria. With syndication capability, information can be selected and pulled by the users, which enhances the chance of the information to be consumed. "New media" brokers can also be easily identified to help facilitate changes and disseminate new knowledge.
3. Management participation. Social networking is in most cases considered as "my kid's stuffs". Lack of understanding and participation from management, especially when transparency increases internally, will be main huddles to success. Sponsorship and participation from management, on the other hand, will help to create initial momentum for the  corporate social networking initiatives.
4. Encourage sharing and giving credit culture, while create incentives for social networking. Without these factors, corporate social networking will not keep its steam. Once the culture and behavior are in place, network effect help to sustain the initiative itself.

Finally, it's important to note again that social networking will happen in organizations anyway, even though its success depends on how much tolerance management have for losing control of communication channels.

 

Comments

[jheuristic]

Hi --

SNA offers a powerful academic tool for scholars and researchers. Network analysis in general is an important discipline. However, for business, SNA only shows a small fraction of the picture. Processes, for example, are entirely left out of org SNA.

A more complete method for network analysis of business is value networks. Value networks and analysis employee the identical mathematical network analysis rigor of SNA but also creates meaning and mappings of the critical process infrastructure. It furnishes visualization and optimization of entire business and economic ecosystems, not just social relationships. See comparisons:

http://kmblogs.com/public/item/166268
http://kmblogs.com/public/item/166232

Most value networks methods, tools, applications and technologies are open source, open content. This is the open gateway –

http://www.value-networks.com/

Cordially,

-j
http://xri.net/=jheuristic

[Tien]

Hi J,

Thanks for your comment and suggestion. I did experience the limitation of SNA when used it for my own division. Similar to your Value Network concept, I tried to combine this picture with our value chain and gained some good insight. However, I didn't have a systematic approach to visualize this. I will follow your links and do a bit more research myself.

Tien.