Signs that Enterprise 2.0 has gone mainstream are everywhere, and this point was driven home to me last week in an interview I did with Scott Monty, the new head of digital communications and social networking for Ford Motors.
While Ford may seem like the quintessential “old economy” company, its approach to social computing, both from the business and the IT perspective, is as far-sighted and strategic as any I’ve encountered. I was interviewing Monty primarily to discuss the relationship between social computing technology and efforts to recruit a next-generation workforce, but surprisingly (to me, at least), that element was not very high on his radar. He and his management are sold on social networking purely on the business value.
“One of the reasons for having a social media strategy is because we have so many different constituencies,” he explains. “We’ve obviously got customers -- that’s the outward facing portion. We’ve got employees for the inward facing [portion]. But we also have shareholders, we have our dealership network, we’ve got unions, we’ve got retirees -- a huge alumni population of Ford retirees. So there are many different aspects to take into account, which is why a well crafted and well thought out strategy should be able to address all of those.”
From an IT perspective, Ford is laying the groundwork for a collaborative infrastructure based on Microsoft SharePoint, but deployment of all the core functions is still a ways down the road. Monty is not about to wait. He’s encouraging people around the company to use whatever tools they can get their hands on to embrace collaboration and discover the business value.
“I’ve discovered people across the company who are using various tools. Whether they are using them for personal or business reasons has yet to play out. But they’re on Twitter, they’re on Facebook, I’m sure they’re on LinkedIn.” Issues of openness and disclosure, Monty believes, are already covered by corporate policies, irrespective of the technology. If anything, employees err on the side of caution. “In the end, if you give people some general guidelines and show that you trust them, they’re going to do the right thing.”
Monty sees one of his roles as leading by example. “I’m on Twitter. I just put an announcement out earlier today that one of my direct reports is leaving. And within three minutes, I got five people that direct-messaged me and wanted to know how they can throw their hat in the ring.”
So far, adoption has been local and opportunistic. Monty wants to make it strategic. “We’ve got a site for owners of vehicles with the SYNC system. It’s an owner-to-owner community, but it’s an excellent chance for product development to observe what’s going on, and in some cases to even respond. My job is to referee and look at the bigger picture here, to help them understand the value of not only listening to these conversations but learning from them and responding to them.”
In the competitive auto-making industry, Ford may still have its problems. However, it appears that willingness to embrace social computing as a full-on business strategy is not one of them.
The goal of the Web 2.0 technology is to ‘democratize’ the information flow. The current traditional organization strucuture, restrictes the flow of information. I believe the only way to upgrade an Enterprise into Enterprise 2.0 is to make organizational and cultural changes to the corporation and thus maximize Web 2.0 benefits. Simply implementing existing Web 2.0 like blogs, wikis as done by Ford and calling that organization as Enterprise 2.0 is nearsighted and that organization will be left behind in this new collaborative and globalized world.
Good luck Scott. It is time for entreprises like Ford to embrace Web 2.0 and profit in the new marketing strategies such as blogging, wiki, and Message Boards. Hopefully you will succeed in your duty. Keep us posted.
I think it's great that you've been hired to do this, Scott! Peppers & Rogers, of One-to-One Marketing fame, have begun to see the opportunities in social networks, and of course, Forrester's Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff have written the book: Groundswell.
LOL... thanks for your response, Scott. If you're successful building in a "patience" feature to your Web 2.0 tools, would you mind shipping it over so we can port it to our own systems? ;->
an enterprise social network or social intranet can enhance communication and collaboration via groups, aggregate data of all sorts that are related to discussion/problems, user interaction and feedback(such as this), document publishing and versioning (the only key element that Sharepoint has over DotNetNuke)/content distribution including dynamic use of audio and video, and allow users to be found by expertise, division, interest, education similarities to put the capabilities vaguely(I'll be revising this to be more precise). Much of the above also includes ranking, rating and obviously COMMENTS. It's the automagic approach in my opinion.
Businesses can identify/react/ and avoid 'pitfalls' especially when enterprise social networks are coupled with enterprise search as well as take giant steps in putting the best ideas forward.
I CAN ONLY IMAGINE THE IMPACT IT WILL HAVE ON THE DESIGN AND ENGINEERING TEAMS AT FORD..OFCOURSE AS WELL AS OTHER CORPORATE DEPARTMENTS - HR can hear 'grunt's and votes in real time...can better shape services as problems can be clearly identified w/o HIRING consultants that will finally fire Milton...justly or not. And the identifying will be at 'no cost'.
Obviously it boosts the communication/collaboration channels within the vertical market and client base.
I equate traditional communication and collaboration vs enterprise web2.0 with this analogy:
You can watch tv, phone or e-mail a friend about what your watching
or
As you're watching tv, directly broadcast and discuss your comments, likes dislikes, related info, bookmarks to other shows etc within the tv - which still can include voice as well as data to an audience of your choice being 1 friend, best friends, family, specific members within your family, your graduating class, your workplace, or all of the above AT ONCE! You can also include someone like me on that syndication/disbribution list also Terry, hehe.
But wait, YOU ALREADY KNEW ALL OF THIS!!! I just realized with the above analogy that YouTube has a whole lot more to offer in the bag of goods.
Interesting column, Rob... apart from using Sharepoint, I don't see what Ford's doing that's particularly Web 2.0 or social networking oriented. Even its use of Twitter seems more elective than strategic.
This all also reflects back to an ongoing conversation at Internet Evolution over whether social network tools are useful for business. Do social networks and tweets have any inherent advantage over email, intranets, or voicemail (apart from the trendiness factor)? I don't see it, but maybe I'm not looking in the right places.
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