A Roadmap for Successful Adoption of Social Computing in the Enterprise

NewsGator White Paper

The success of Facebook, Wikipedia, Twitter and other social computing tools often creates soaring expectations for viral adoption of social computing in business settings. While the “just build it and they will come” strategy may work in the consumer world, it’s a dangerous approach for business: users may never come, or they may come and waste their time.

NewsGator has helped hundreds of Fortune 2000 companies plan and execute Enterprise 2.0 initiatives and has codified that experience into a flexible roadmap for enterprise social computing adoption. NewsGator’s systematic implementation approach will help ensure that Enterprise 2.0 initiatives make sense to users and improve business performance exactly as intended.

The roadmap offers six key steps that can help any organization to improve the success of its social computing initiatives:

1. Identify business problems and goals
2. Define use cases to help solve business problems
3. Select the correct technologies
4. Publish best practices for use
5. Identify obstacles to participation
6. Identify desired cultural transformations

Enterprises that follow a model like this are more likely to reap the many business benefits that enterprise social computing can deliver including improved collaboration, enhanced productivity, and increased innovation.