What does social software bring ? Nothing by itself (contrary to many others, a social app doesn’t process or treat anything but allow people to do things…) but since it makes some things more easy to do it should, in principle, help to improve performance and productivity for many kind of tasks provided people understand they have to slightly change the way they work (what does not means changing work fundamentals but only adjust a few things).
Most often, operations managers can’t see the concrete benefits. To do so they would need to take hindsight but they don’t have time and are too involved to. Consequence : top executives often have the vision while people who have their hands in everyday operations still wonder what problem this new things actually solve, why they’d need to socialize their work, share part of the information. Everyone know what a solution that solves no problem (or no problem people are aware of) is worth.
An approach that sometimes work is to ask managers to imagine themselves at the client’s place. Note that a client could either be an external client or an internal client. Their staff’s job is to meet the client’s need and their role, as managers, is to make sure they will, in the assigned time limit, without being directly in touch with the client. Furthermore, in many cases, managers have to get in thouch with clients only when things go wrong. It’s all the more easy to imagine oneself at the client’s place since everyone know how being a client is, either from internal or external providers. Sometimes, realizing that you do exactly what you don’t like your providers to do is a big step to progress.
You can find the "original" french version of this blog here
