Today I attended Jive Software’s Get Social tour stop in Toronto and left impressed not only with the company’s software and strategy, but with the quality of attendance at the event. The event featured a hour (and a bit) of keynotes including a look at how Canada’s RIM has used Jive’s SBS to deploy mybackberry.com. What impressed me the most was the level of interest and activity from Canada’s largest companies. In the breakout I attended there was representation from 4 of the 6 largest banks, well known national law firms, ad agencies and professional services companies.

Personally, my interest in attending came from discovering significant interest in the integration of social software tools within business processes. In fact I have touched on this in several blogs already (here, here and here) and have found myself spending an increasing amount of time fielding questions from financial professionals on the topic of how their investments in tools like SAP or Microsoft Dynamics along with SharePoint can be further leveraged to move people from communal watering holes of information (ala SharePoint, Stellent (now part of Oracle), OpenText, etc.) to proactive, automated community distribution networks. And business execs want these social services/tools to be part of existing business processes and applications from ERP to CRM to BI – and not to have to rip and replace investments they’ve already made.

To address this need Jive has developed its Social Business Software platform. This platform is based on a addressing a need to leverage existing technology investments – both on-premise and software as a service – made by organizations and intertwine social tools which are quickly maturing from the consumer technology world (Facebook, twitter, DIGG, etc.) into the business arena.

The Jive SBS solution should be very interesting to companies who’ve found themselves sinking in email, departmental collaboration websites, individual shared drives with unique folder structures, client-based office productivity tools, or aging client server business applications with little web extensibility. Their idea is to offer software solutions to organizations seeking to bring current consumer focused social features into the context of a secure, robust business processes and integrate these into the existing information and presentation layers used by their employees. Think ‘facebook’ that allows individual users to create ‘friends’ of co-workers, partners, suppliers and also applications – ERP, data repositories, content management systems, etc.

An interesting quote from the Jive Software presenter was that one of their goals is “…to enable the solutions from being ‘place-centric’ (e.g. a data or content repository) to ‘you-centric’.” The promise of this approach is to enable content relevance to the job you and/or your employees are doing - further amplifying the time to value that the business or community can benefit from. This can be achieved by using technology to enable systems to constantly seek information based on your criteria and deliver internal and external content in a timely fashion to the end-user.

I’ll be writing more on this topic, but for now my advice (based on what I have seen so far) for organizations  looking at social technology solutions that can fit into existing business processes is to:

  • Plan – Look at (audit) how your employees are communicating in the office versus outside the office. Determine how this may or may not fit into different aspects of your business process and technologies.
  • Promote – Promote activities that promote collaboration that benefits the organization, team and individual. Begin to recognize good ideas from individuals and identify who might be a super user by department and even age group (e.g. don’t have a 20 something trying to sell social tools to a 50 something CEO)
  • Execute – Pick a part of the business that demand business process rigor, but also has an affinity for new technologies. Obtain the buy-in and support from the executive in charge and pilot a solution that brings together social technologies with financial, customer and partner data. Observe its usage, recognize individual contribution and learn from the effects this has on average and advanced users.
  • Deliver – Realize that this is a game changer. IT must be involved, but the business user will in some cases control the success of the project based on how they adopt and use the technology in conjunction with their specific needs. Don’t bury the data in a common format that you make them adhere to – rather encourage them to rank and promote what they find valuable. Deliver an experience rather than a product.
  • Hand over control – The hive of users will self organize around value and efficiencies. This is seen in nature and technology and is paramount to successful social software. In your planning you should have covered the governance and controls needed that are required by your business and ensured these are documented for your users. Now let them drive the interest and improvements of the software going forward.

The last part (IMHO) is the innovation aspect that is key to socializing your business.