In the mid-2000s, businesses believed they had found the solution to a chronic problem: lack of collaboration, silo mentality, difficulty sharing information, inability to capitalize on tacit knowledge, and so on. Inspired by what they saw on the web with the rise of social media (blogs, wikis, etc.) and what were not yet called social networks (Facebook did not arrive until later), they saw enterprise social networks as the solution to problems they had been facing since the dawn of time.
They all started wanting their own “internal Facebook”. Platforms such as Yammer, Jive, BlueKiwi, Chatter, IBM Connections, among others (names that will no doubt provoke a certain nostalgia among my oldest readers) promised us a revolution in the way we collaborate: greater openness, recognition of individual contributors, capture of tacit knowledge, and collective intelligence on a large scale. We would finally be able to work like we do on the web, like we do on Facebook, but in a professional setting.
The vocabulary is meaningful: we talk about conversations, communities, participation, engagement, and the promise is strong: to profoundly transform the work culture.
As I recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of this blog and a strange coincidence brought the subject back to the table during a recent business lunch on the theme of “what has become of it and why it didn’t work,” I thought it would be interesting to take stock of a subject that has been the focus of 90% of my articles for the past decade or so. So that, I hope, I never have to revisit the subject again.
In short:
- Enterprise social networks (ESNs) were born out of a hope for collaborative transformation inspired by Web 2.0, but were driven by excessive expectations and a lack of understanding of how they are actually used in business.
- Their relative failure can be explained by a lack of integration into everyday work, cultural incompatibility, a lack of managerial support, and confusion between collaboration and user-friendliness.
- ESNs were often launched without transforming practices or a real desire to change management methods, leading to limited adoption and gradual disengagement.
- Despite their decline, the principles they embodied (sharing, cross-functionality, engagement) have spread to other tools that are better integrated into business processes (e.g., Teams, Slack, Notion).
- The legacy of ESNs lies in the evolution of modern collaborative tools, which, without claiming to be revolutionary, have discreetly but effectively integrated a social dimension into the workplace.
A technology driven by enthusiasm and illusions
History tells us that in the early years, enterprise social networking (or ESN) projects multiplied, which is a slight embellishment of the situation. Or perhaps we disagree on the dates.
Personally, I plunged into this adventure in 2005, working alongside blueKiwi, which I joined in 2006. At that time, the term “enterprise social network” didn’t even exist, since no one knew what a social network was. Don’t forget that Facebook only opened to the general public in 2008, and it was only then that Gartner created the “enterprise social networking” market category.
Before that, we didn’t even know what we were selling, and customers didn’t know what they were buying. Blogs, wikis, knowledge management collaboration tools… everyone saw what they wanted to see, which isn’t ideal for finding your product-market fit.
But even though we weren’t seeing a proliferation of projects, curiosity about these professional Web 2.0 tools was very real. There were lots of questions, demos, and pilot projects, but few real projects behind them.
Yes, there was enthusiasm for a tool that was unlike anything else and held a ton of promise, often with oversized expectations. But precisely because it was unlike anything else, businesses didn’t really know what to do with it or how to incorporate it into their daily operations.
Then came the real takeoff a few years later and, let’s admit it, once the big players in the industry took an interest in the subject after letting the little guys clear the way: Microsoft first tried to convince the market that Sharepoint was a “social” tool (and some believed it…) before buying credibility by acquiring Yammer. IBM, for its part, packaged an internal tool that perfectly matched the DNA and brought it to market: Lotus Connection, which would become IBM Connection.
It didn’t matter that these tools suffered in comparison with the pure players in their early versions; they helped to lend credibility to their vision and value proposition.
It was a time of enthusiasm. Every large business or community wanted its own internal social space. Platforms were launched, a few ambassadors were trained, and sometimes communication campaigns were organized to encourage employees to “like”, comment, and share.
But very quickly, it became clear that most ESNs were not taking off. Adoption was stagnating. Engagement dropped as soon as the hype died down. Above all, the practical usefulness of these platforms remained unclear to most employees.
Of course, there were some big successes in businesses whose DNA was perfectly suited to the tool, but in most organizations, I saw a patient on life support who would eventually be taken off the machine, and I estimate that the big shutdown will happen around 2015.
Some projects were halted, others were allowed to die a natural death, but as we will see, something remained, once again validating Bill Gates’ quote that “we always overestimate the change that will occur in the next two years and underestimate the change that will occur in the next ten“. The takeoff didn’t happen, the hype died down, but in 2025, the uses we’re talking about are almost everywhere, even if they don’t match the ideals of the early days. But we’ll talk about that later.
Why did it fail? Because the gamble of a profound cultural change was entrusted to a tool, without transforming practices, responsibilities, or management methods.
A structural, systemic mistake
I remember my first encounter with such a product, blueKiwi. Or rather, with the slides presenting a product that was still in development.
If I remember correctly, the original idea came from a business that wanted a knowledge management tool inspired by blogs and wikis, which is how it was presented to me.
When I was asked for my opinion, given that I had already written a number of articles on how the philosophy of Web 2.0 could transform management provided it was supported by the right tools, I replied that I saw it as a management tool, another way of organizing work, disseminating knowledge, creating engagement, valuing contributors, and and no longer making managers a bottleneck (Eliyahu Goldratt’s fictional interview on infobesity and bottlenecks in knowledge work) but rather the true leaders of the team…
But for that to happen, we still had to want to manage differently.
This explains why the DNA of certain businesses has led to resounding success, while elsewhere the transplant either failed to take root or ended up being rejected.
It could be said that in 2010, the case was clear for anyone willing to open their eyes.
The relative failure of ESNs can therefore be explained by a series of recurring errors.
A lack of connection to real work
Most corporate social networks were seen as separate spaces that were consulted “in addition to everything else,” where people behaved differently than they did during the rest of their workday.
They weren’t connected to business tools or workflows and were a kind of bubble disconnected from the rest.
I remember that two schools of thought coexisted at the time.
The first talked about “adoption,” a way of saying that users had to take steps to appropriate the tool, find meaning in it and in the change, and put their hearts into it.
Maybe it was my rational side talking, but I never believed in it for a second. For me, there were two complementary approaches.
The first was social routine (Enterprise 2.0 : adoption through social routine, Socialize your business ? What does it mean ?), a way of saying (and this has been confirmed by cases among my clients) that there are ways of working that must be imposed by management if employees do not adopt them naturally.
The second was the socialization of processes (The twilight of enterprise 2.0 and the emergence of process socialization). The idea here was to say that problems occur in the workflow, in business tools, and that the solution lies in what was called emerging collaboration. At worst, employees would act as a link between the two worlds; at worst, we would help them by connecting the two worlds, which was done by some publishers, but too late.
Looking back, I think I realized that the dream was over when I heard “we won’t connect an ESN to SAP or any other” or “we are the new world, they are the old.” My opinion was that we needed both, and both together (You can’t talk about collaboration without talking about processes and operations), and that otherwise the center of gravity of the work would not shift to a new tool.
In short, the idea was that we were not going to move from one mode of work organization to another, but rather organize the coexistence of several (Enterprise 2.0 as a part of the Global Enterprise).
I won’t dwell on the subject any further, since we know how the story ends, but suffice it to say that if practitioners couldn’t agree among themselves, if we spent our time trying to figure out how it should work, with the debates ending up almost ideological, the chances of spontaneous adoption by businesses were close to zero.
The lack of managerial embodiment
If there is one recurring debate, it is that on the future of management. It is a topic that has been raised at regular intervals since the 1950s, and with increasing frequency. Logically, the debate has resurfaced with the promises of Web 2.0 philosophy.
We are also in the era when Peter Drucker wrote “The Future of Management”, which is fully in line with this discourse and provides a wealth of arguments for proponents of corporate social networks. In fact, he said in his book that “management 2.0 will look a lot like Web 2.0.”
That said, beyond the tool itself, we now talk about Enterprise 2.0, Management 2.0, etc. (Enterprise 2.0, Management 2.0, HR 2.0 and Culture 2.0 according to Jon Husband).
All practitioners agreed that an enterprise social networking platform made no sense outside these new paradigms, and I think that by writing and explaining this in numerous conferences around the world, businesses have understood.
Except that they had no desire to change paradigms, or rather, the road ahead seemed too long and dangerous, which amounts to much the same thing.
Instead, they relied on technology to give the appearance of change on the surface, while the foundations remained unchanged, thinking that this would do the job. But it didn’t.
The rest is logical: managers saw no reason to get involved, to motivate their teams in a new way, and worse, businesses appointed or even hired internal community managers to remedy the situation, whose managerial legitimacy vis-à-vis the teams was, as you can imagine, close to zero.
I can’t help thinking that the vision was right, but the break was too big. We can see this today in what we are starting to ask of managers in terms of their attitude. Once again, it takes time, a lot of time, for things to happen quickly.
Confusion between informality and collaboration:
It was often believed that creating a social network was enough to make an organization collaborative, but collaboration cannot be decreed: it must be built, managed, and nourished by a shared sense of purpose and rituals.
This brings us back to the debate between the adoption and proactive transformation of work modes and flows.
But this informality was also a double-edged sword. Businesses wanted the fluidity of social networks but not the codes that went with them. They were afraid of employees speaking up, afraid of seeing management decisions being discussed, afraid of communication that was beyond their control.
I saw businesses ask for systematic moderation of all contributions, and others where the communications department wanted to choose the participants and impose an editorial line.
Of course, the rules had to be adapted, and experience has shown that the problem was not excessive behavior but self-censorship. Until then, nothing prevented an employee from saying anything they wanted in an email, and no one saw it to correct the mistake.
But in some cases, governance killed the project before it even got off the ground.
The dispersion of tools
I have always assumed that employees had found a balance between two tools, their usual business tool and email, without prejudging the good or bad use made of the latter.
Social networks had to find their place in this, most often without integrating.
Then the dynamics driven by social networks were integrated into business tools: profile pages, discussion forums, and even conversations organized around business cases and data to link the two.
Isolated in its corner, the social network never found its place in everyday life, and its added value shifted to other tools, perhaps in a diluted and decentralized way, but ending up where employees actually worked.
The wrong tool for a good idea
I said relative failure because, although enterprise social networks did not have the success and impact that was hoped for, their ideas did not die with them.
The value of cross-functional sharing, recognition of internal expertise, the ability to bring together professional communities, and transparency as a driver of engagement, to name but a few, are more relevant than ever, but have found their place elsewhere.
Today, it is Teams, Slack, Notion, Confluence, and even modernized and fully integrated intranets that enable more fluid social collaboration because they are integrated into everyday tasks and backed by concrete uses such as projects, support, training, onboarding, and innovation.
Social networks have mostly sought to exist on their own or with very little integration into business tools, while claiming a central position in the daily lives of employees, and this has been their downfall. But I don’t blame the vendors: customers themselves were reluctant to embrace advanced integration even when it was possible.
Today, reactions, discussion threads, open sharing, enriched profiles, and comments have become commonplace features in modern collaborative tools, and business tools have themselves become collaborative. It is no longer a dedicated platform, but an omnipresent social layer, discreet but effective.
Bottom line
Enterprise social networks have not failed because social collaboration was a utopia, but because the tool preceded the culture, and the conditions for success were not in place: clear objectives, perceived usefulness, managerial support, governance, facilitation, integration into business processes and tools.
Even today, some organizations manage to maintain dynamic internal communities through an ESN or similar platform, but they are the exception. These are businesses where the tool is supported by concrete practices, is carefully moderated, and where the culture generally preceded the tool.
The greatness of enterprise social networks was their ambition: to make the business more open, more horizontal, more human. Their mistake was to believe that a tool could be enough.
But their legacy is to have started a movement that other approaches, sometimes more modest but always more integrated, continue to keep alive today and that no one will question.
The early ideologists will certainly be disappointed, but as a pragmatist, I am more than satisfied.
Image credit: Image generated by artificial intelligence via ChatGPT (OpenAI)
