SOCIAL SOFTWARE BEST PRACTICES

Considerations for Effectively Implementing a Collaborative KM Platform

Learning & knowledge systems
As with any enterprise technology solution, identifying the right technology is crucial, but equally important to success is having a comprehensive, achievable implementation plan based upon best practices. Without a quality plan, the implementation can be easily flawed and results poor.

There has been working with clients to implement and deploy the collaborative KM solutions since 1999 and has a wealth of experience with a variety of clients, industries, and user community models. Based on this experience, there was created a set of implementation best practices that help guide you through a series of decisions you need to make to effectively plan your solution, avoid common pitfalls, and ensure your success.

An effective Social Software implementation consists of careful, deliberate planning that includes the following steps:

·               Defining an initiative or business vision

·               Identifying an initial scope and target audience

·               Creating value for participants

·               Assembling a communication and outreach plan

·               Driving ongoing participation through active management and reporting

·               Creating measurements and analysis to quantify success and return on investment

As with any enterprise technology solution, identifying the right technology is crucial, but equally important to success is having a comprehensive, achievable implementation plan based upon best practices. Without a quality plan, the implementation can be easily flawed and results poor.

Defining a Business Vision and Objectives

The first step for initiating a Social Software implementation should be to identify the guiding initiative or business vision behind the solution. Alternately, a more expedient option to defining your own initiative can be to add on to an existing initiative. In other words, determine if your implementation can be used to enhance existing initiatives such as employee training, sales enablement, customer training, customer support, or your corporate intranet. The time you will save in building the necessary support for your own initiative can then be spent planning your actual impleentation.

Clients will often be asissted with breaking down their overall business vision into a series of measurable business objectivs. The business objectives for Social Software initiatives typically fall into three categories:

Overall Mission

·               Definition: What is the overall business vision or driver of this project?

·               Examples: To provide additional training support to new employees. To shorten the information request cycle for our sales organization. To provide a scalable, self sustaining peer to peer customer support solution.

Performance

·               Definition: How will you evaluate the success of this initiative? What will success look like?

·               Examples: Enterprise content must be readily accessible. Platform must be stable and available to the business 24‐7. Organizational expertise must be easy to find and leverage. System is effectively diverting calls from support. System is shortening sales cycles.

Adoption

·               Definition: How successful have you been in getting users to adopt system?

·               Examples: To have at least 50% registered users who use the system at least once a month. The median response time for questions to subject matter experts is less than 24 hours.