Three interesting findings from MIT/Sloan Review on why Social Business projects fail, based on data from the 2013 social business report from MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte, “Social Business: Shifting out of First Gear,” (points summarised below):
1. Managers go into social business with unclear business objectives.
The first insight can be found in the question that asked respondents whether the social business initiative they were involved in was started to address a specific business problem. Sixty three percent of respondents indicated “no.”
This situation, a classic one with information technology, occurs when managers hear about the latest technological developments and decide their organizations need to adopt these tools simply because colleagues and competitors are doing so.
Uncritical adoption of technology, particularly when associated with social business, is a recipe for failure
2. Initiatives start as pilots then fizzle out due to modest participation.
A clear business objective may not be initially necessary, however, if the initiative is explicitly started as a pilot project…..Indeed, about half of the respondents indicated that the social business initiatives without a clear business objective were intended as a pilot project.
The problem with pilot projects is that they require an important condition for success that is often painfully lacking in most organizations — slack resources. If employees are going to figure out how to employ new social business tools in their work, they need free time to explore the technologies and figure out how to integrate it into their work.
3. Companies expect social initiatives, even pilots, to deliver a financial return on investment.
The third insight comes from the fact that 53% of social business initiatives are expected to deliver a financial return on investment (ROI). This finding, by itself, is not surprising of course. The desire to demonstrate ROI is understandable in for-profit companies, even if it is often notoriously difficult to achieve with social business initiatives.
More surprising is that there is a surprisingly low correlation between the desire for a financial return on investment and responses to the previous two questions.
As the article points out, it is difficult to quantify or achieve ROI in social business initiatives when its business objective has not been clearly defined.
It was interesting in the Enterprise 2.0 Summit in Paris that over and over 3 key points were felt to drive successful projects:
- Solve a business problem
- Even if there is no formal ROI, understand how value will be created by the Social Business project
- Get backing from the resource holders – pilots and point systems can only grow so far.