July Catalyst Conference on Enterprise Social Media in San Diego

The Catalyst Conference was July 27-31 in San Diego which gathered many people to discuss new technologies for enterprise computing.
On Wednesday, July 29 at 11:15 a.m. I gave a presentation about the use of social network analysis within the enterprise.

Session Details: Social Network Analysis: A New Source Of Business Intelligence

Mike Gotta, Principal Analyst, Burton Group with Marc Smith, Internet Sociologist

Where do people go when they need subject-matter expertise? How do you discover someone in your company who knows someone in a firm you’re trying to sell products and services into? Who is the person everyone goes to when they need to find out what’s really going on? Such relationships within organizations have been difficult to identify and leverage because they are often invisible to those outside people’s informal and personal networks. Technology has compounded the problem by fragmenting interactions between people across a multitude of tools. The advent of social networking sites within the enterprise (e.g., a “Corporate Facebook”) has triggered a resurgence of interest in the visualization and analysis of relationship structures.  Social network analysis represents a new source of insight that aids a variety of business activities. It can also reveal interaction patterns and relationship structures that help strategists improve organizational effectiveness.  As social networks gain increased adoption, numerous issues arise:

• How should relationship data be leveraged? What are the applications?
• Who conducts this type of work – do IT organizations have the skills?
• Will identifying “social roles” become a key component of organizational development and management practices? What are the privacy concerns?

In this session, Marc Smith will outline SNA trends and discuss real-world examples with Principal Analyst Mike Gotta of Burton Group.

Some tweets from the talk:

• Spesh00: I think Marc Smith just completely validated my prior statement about leveraging my social score against my knowledge tags. #catalyst09
• atownley: Moving discussions for internal use from email to messageboards, etc. to segregate personal/corp data – Marc Smith #smchat #catalyst09
• aewang: Chief Social Scientist (Marc Smith) – what a cool title! #catalyst09
• aewang: Love Marc Smith‘s comment about ascribing status vs. achieving status. achieving hard to do w/o social media #catalyst09
• atownley: Very interesting presentation from Marc Smith of Telligent on social analytics of many different sources for “networks” #smchat #catalyst09
• aewang: Interesting presentation from Marc Smith @Telligent on social analytics #catalyst09
• Spesh00: NodeXL – Free program for Social Analytics.. Looks slick as all get out. #catalyst09
• Spesh00: Social Network Analysis from Mike Gotta and Marc Smith. I wanna be the “Discussion Person”… #catalyst09

There were several notable points made during presentations that captured my attention:

• Social Media platforms are seen as meta identity servers.  Where LDAP and AD are not end user editable (usually), social media allows self-annotation AND annotation on others.
• Metrics in enterprise social media can be applied to assess how much an organization is isolated in silos: compartmentalized enterprises have few links across organizations.
• Issues with employees who leave (and might someday return) – how to keep the information while freezing the identity.
• Identity Management is a major area: lots of talk about “ascribed” roles (you are a person who can approve payments) versus “achieved” roles (you start behaving like an Answer Person).
• Identity leakage and diffusion: what happens when internal profile data gets outside or outside social media gets pulled internally?  If content is created on employee owned device and on personal time is it owned by the corporation?
• Citrix embraces employee provisioned hardware: provides $2,100 to employees to buy a laptop that meets or exceeds corporate requirements.  They own it and take it with them if/when they leave.
• Booz Allen Hamilton embraces internal social media, demonstrates value to organization versus “free and public” sites.  Will onboard 5K NEW EMPLOYEES this year!  Need to integrate new people fast!