Continuing Social Networking Failure for Laboratory Informatics and Others

It seems as if, approximately every couple of months, one customer or another tells me that their company’s social networking plan is failing. Or, I see some presentation at a conference or read an article about some company’s great success only to find out that it’s not true. Also, I noticed someone found my blog using the search phrase “social networking inter company” and I figured I’d comment on this topic.

The Story I Keep Hearing
What seems to happen is that someone at a Vice President or Director level decides that their company needs to “get with the 21st century” and this means getting an inter-company social networking tool. It will help everyone “collaborate” and “work smarter not harder.” You all know what happens, next. The company spends a bunch of money on licenses for some internal social networking tool, a bunch more money to implement it, and then hardly anyone uses it.

The problem with this is that you can’t take a “build it and they will come” approach. That works with baseball diamonds and ghosts of baseball players, as well as with living hobbyists. It doesn’t work well with most busy people regarding their work. When you want to “empower” your people, you need to do more than throw new tools at them. Like any other software project, you need to do all the following really boring project things:
1. Get buy-in.
2. Show people how the tool will help them.
3. Provide incentive to use it, help them to use it, force them to use it, etc… Basically, find some way to get them actually touching it and knowing about it.

More Stories
On top of hearing about these failures, I do hear success stories, usually in conference presentations or articles. And then, I usually hear what a sham the presentation or article was, that some tiny handful of people are using the software and hoping by giving presentations and writing articles to convince others they’ve been successful when, in fact, no-one else at their very large company wants anything to do with it. This is the usual behavior where we try to make ourselves sound important and successful to the public when, in fact, our project hasn’t succeeded. Yet, we cannot publicly admit to this so we write articles and give presentations to make the public give us some back-pats when our own people won’t do it. It’s the usual problem of too many of the “happy path” stories we get at conferences and in articles.

One More Story
There is actually one rather famous presentation where a group did have some actual success with making their own group collaborative. They give a great presentation about how they did it and how you can, too. The sad bit is that the rest of the groups in their own company refuse to try their successful strategy due to politics and the NIH (not invented here) tack that some divisions take with regard to even their own co-workers in other divisions.

What’s sad is that small companies don’t have others trying out these types of efforts to learn from within their own company. Small companies sometimes assume the large companies have an advantage because, somewhere in a big company, someone is doing just the thing that you’d like to learn about. Unfortunately, in large companies, either the group doing something successful won’t share what they’ve learned OR the situation is that no-one else is willing to learn from them. The rest of us can be jealous of the resources large companies have, but it’s pointless because many of them don’t even make use of the resources they do have in an efficient manner.

Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/