Elearning! April

2013

Elearning! Magazine: Building Smarter Companies via Learning & Workplace Technologies.

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Capturing Business Value with Social Technologies AS THESE POWERFUL TECHNOLOGIES SHAKE UP PRODUCTIVITY AND GROWTH ACROSS INDUSTRIES, THEY WILL CREATE NEW ORGANIZATIONAL IMPERATIVES. BY JACQUES BUGHIN, MICHAEL CHUI AND JAMES MANYIKA Social technologies, in their relatively brief period of existence, have found favor with consumers faster than previous technologies did. It took 13 years for commercial television to reach 50 million households and three years for Internet service providers to sign their 50 millionth subscriber. Facebook hit the 50 million–user mark in just a year and Twitter in nine months. Sweeping cultural, economic, and social changes have accompanied this accelerated pace of adoption by the world's consumers. Companies, too, have adopted these technologies but have generated only a small fraction of the potential value they can create. An in-depth analysis of four industry sectors that represent almost 20 percent of global industry sales suggests that social platforms can unlock $900 billion to $1.3 trillion in value in those sectors alone. Two-thirds of this value creation opportunity lies in im38 April / May 2013 Elearning! proving communication and collaboration within and across enterprises. Frequently, these improvements will go well beyond the areas many companies have focused on to date in their social-media eforts: connecting with consumers, deriving customer insights for marketing and product development, and providing customer service. Since "social" features can be added to almost any digital application that involves interactions among people, the range of uses is immense and measurement correspondingly challenging. Tus, we cast a wide net. We studied several hundred cases of organizations using social technologies around the globe. In addition, we examined the patterns of knowledge work within organizations and drew insights from data covering several years of surveys involving thousands of global executives on the ways their companies use social technologies. Our analysis of successful uses served as a basis for modeling potential improvements across the value chain. Of late, some bearish sentiments surround social technologies afer disappointments for several companies in the capital markets. It's worth noting, however, that today only 5 percent of communications occur on social networks. Moreover, almost all digital human interactions can ultimately become "social," and jobs involving physical labor and the processing of trans- actions are giving way, across the globe, to work requiring complex interactions with other people, independent judgment, and the analysis of information. As a result, we believe social technologies are destined to play a much larger role not only in individual interactions but also in how companies are organized and managed. PRODUCTIVITY POSSIBILITIES We estimate that using social technologies to improve collaboration and communication within and across companies could raise the productivity of interaction workers by 20 to 25 percent (Exhibit 1). Tese dramatic gains would occur thanks to shifs in the way these workers communicate — from using channels designed for oneto-one communication, such as email and phone calls, to social channels, which allow "many-to-many" communication. Specifcally, our research indicates that interaction workers typically spend 28 percent of each day (13 hours a week) reading, writing, and responding to emails. A huge amount of valuable company knowledge is locked up in them. As companies adopt social platforms, communication becomes a new form of content, and more enterprise information can become readily accessible and easily searchable rather than sequestered as inbox "dark matter." Employees

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