Business leaders are more enthusiastic about social media than IT
A couple weeks back, the Economist Intelligence Unit reported the results of a study that revealed 80% of companies believe the range of technologies that fall under the Web 2.0 label can lead to improvements in their businesses. Since then, a couple companies have announced significant initiatives.
On last Thursday’s “Hobson & Holtz Report,” I talked about Accenture’s efforts to remake the consulting firm’s intranet. The company has already unveiled a Facebook-like employee network and is adding wikis, employee bookmarking (a la del.icio.us), an internal video discovery and sharing service like YouTube, and a Second Life-like environment for employee training.
Now, Wells Fargo is the latest to announce the implementation of these technologies as a means of achieving business goals. And it’s pretty much the same set of tools Accenture employed, according to an article in CMP’s “Wall Street & Technology.” These tools are being applied both internally and externally, as a means of communicating with customers.
“We were building tools to share information inside the company, but they were always these very structured things,” says Steve Ellis, EVP of Wells Fargo’s wholesale solutions group. “A blog is informal—a great way to get away from the corporate thing and let people inside our heads.” The company’s hundreds of blogs have become the most-read nonbanking pages on Wells Fargo’s site. A few groups within the company have even started experimenting with video blogs. Further, the EVP of the bank’s Internet services group holds weekly office hours for team members to discuss new ideas submitted to a wiki.
Despite banking’s obsession with numbers, Ellis hasn’t had to produce a spreadsheet to justify the use of these tools. “I can just go out and tell our boss I know we’ll be better off,” he said, noting that it’s easy to see the value of technologies like RSS, which let employees easily tailor the content they receive so they read “news that matters most to them on the job.”
An InformationWeek survey of IT pros didn’t reveal the same enthusiasm as the Economist Intelligence Unit survey, which which focused its queries on senior executives, not technology pros. Among IT leaders, more than half were skeptical of social media tools; some were amenable to giving them a try but remained cautious. More than 50% of the companies resonding to the survey don’t use blogs, and 41% have no wikis. Among IT concerns: security, ROI, and worries that their staffs don’t have the skills required to “implement and integrate” the tools.
At Wells Fargo, it’s Ellis—EVP of the wholesale solutions group—driving Web 2.0 solutions, while an EVP of an Internet team remains unconvinced, according to the “Wall Street & Technology” article.
It’s interesting, isn’t it, that business leaders seem to have more enthusiasm for social media applications as business tools than their peers in IT. It should serve as a reminder that IT is a service function that should implement business solutions identified by business leaders. It remindes me of a terrific article from the Harvard Business Review, “Six IT Decisions Your IT People Shouldn’t Make:”
The first three relate to strategy: How much should we spend on IT? Which business processes should receive our IT dollars? Which IT capabilities need to be companywide? The second three relate to execution: How good do our IT services really need to be? Which security and privacy risks will we accept? Whom do we blame if an IT initiative fails?
The article, from 2002, costs only $6 to retrieve as a PDF download.
04/30/07 | 9 Comments | Business leaders are more enthusiastic about social media than IT