For our collaboration and social software vendor evaluation research, we look at different customer implementations and spend a lot of time understanding and analyzing how different enterprises are trying to derive business value from their social software projects.

Customer Story: Continued Challenges

One theme that we consistently see is how tough it is for social software projects to scale across the enterprise. In many cases, success achieved at the departmental level proves elusive to replicate across the enterprise. In other instances, enterprises struggle to sustain initial success over longer periods of time.

We also find that an enterprise typically implements social software for only a couple of use cases while in the aggregate we’ve noted a dozen or so use case archetypes. In short, our experience suggests that despite much hype, it is still early stages of enterprise adoption of social software.

Vendor Story: "You're Behind!"

However, vendor marketing pitches and their case studies try to paint a much rosier picture. Logos of large enterprises with thousands of employees across the globe figure on their slides and many prospective customers may mistakenly assume that they’re the only laggards. Also, many vendors are large organizations in their own right and one of the reference case studies they throw at you the transformation they’ve achieved in their own organizational backyards.

So, it was very interesting to take a peek at the “live” enterprise social network implementation of a large global vendor (who shall remain unnamed in this piece – my intention is not to name and shame here).

The Real Story: They're Behind...

I expected to see a thousand flowers blooming – the latest and greatest enterprise social applications being enthusiastically embraced by the vendor's employees, knowledge getting mined, social capital successfully generated, new connections created, serendipity rearing its lovely head – you know, all the good stuff that slideware is made of.

But what did I instead find? A virtual ghost town: not much activity, no great adoption, not much enthusiasm, and I’d wager not much business value. So, what gives? Well, let’s be charitable and say this vendor (along with other large enterprises) too cannot defy the laws of doing social at scale.

Yet, despite what they could not accomplish themselves, they’ll promise you Shangri-La.

Dig Deeper

I’d say as a smart buyer, the next time you see a case study, peel the layers and examine the length, breadth, and depth of the implementation, whether it’s a departmental level or a true enterprise-wide initiative, and assess whether you have a reasonable chance of replicating such success in your own organizational context. Also, check the repertoire of best practices available in our evaluation research to see if any of them prove handy for you.