Transforming the Business through Social Tools by McKinsey&Company
McKinsey&Company Survey on Social Business Tools
McKinsey publishes an annual survey on the effect of social technologies on business. The January 2015 survey is entitled:Transforming the business through social tools. Some conclusions of note:
- Adoption of Social Technologies is becoming commonplace.
- It is still difficult to measure the impact and value of using social tools
- Early adopters are seeing disproportionate value and extending their use
As seen above, early adopters of social technology, those well on their way to becoming a Social Business, are finding unexpected impacts to how their business runs! As knowledge workers incorporate social technologies into their day-to-day the impact accelerates. As McKinsey states in their survey:
To achieve this impact and increased productivity across the entire business, most companies must become better at engaging more employees, customers, and external partners through social tools, then capturing new benefits and measuring them in a systematic way. At the companies seeing the greatest benefits from social interactions, respondents are much likelier than others to say these tools are highly integrated into all processes, not only their sales-and-marketing activities.
The Future of Social Business is Bright
McKinsey concludes that the vast majority of organizations, seventy two percent, are increasing their investments in social technologies. With that said, nearly all of the executives surveyed believe that social technologies are transformative yielding positive changes to organizational processes and management processes. There are a wide variety of expected impacts. I suspect this is due to how and where an organization started implementing social technologies. The important thing to note is that the early adopters are seeing increasing impacts and accelerating the use of social technologies. The adoption of social technologies creates a virtuous, positive feedback cycle and the rich get richer. McKinsey “looks ahead” and offers this advice:
- Start with a Focused Approach
- Nominate a specific use case and implement for success
- Broaden out once you’ve established a center of excellence
- Build in Metrics
- Benchmark existing practices
- Development a measurement framework to then track how social technologies improve upon “as is”
- Realize it is a Change Management Effort
- Social Technologies will change how people work with each other
- Good old fashioned OE or Organization Effectiveness processes can be used in conjunction with the rollout of social technologies to aid the the implementation
Read the full survey by McKinsey&Company by clicking through the PDF Survey McKinsey Transforming the business through social tools or contect me to discuss your Social Business needs!
