Not All Enterprise Social Networking Solutions are Created Equal

Transcription

1 50 Years of Growth, Innovation and Leadership Not All Enterprise Social Networking Solutions are Created Equal IT Considerations have Direct Impact on ROI A Frost & Sullivan White Paper Robert Arnold

2 Frost & Sullivan Executive Summary... 3 The Value of a Social Enterprise... 4 Build with an Integrated Approach... 4 Intangibles Enhance ROI... 5 Conclusion... 8 CONTENTS

3 Not All Enterprise Social Networking Solutions are Created Equal EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Social software promises benefits such as increasing employee engagement, driving collaboration, bolstering contribution and access to resources, enhancing business processes, fostering innovation, and improving organizational knowledge and responsiveness. To capitalize fully on these opportunities, social software requires an understanding of the real underlying costs of such an investment. To maximize the return on investment (ROI) of enterprise social technology, decision-makers must evaluate those technical aspects of the application that go beyond user-centric capabilities. There are important design differences among the various enterprise social platforms, and they can have significant impact on operational, integration, and compliance costs. Adding social software as a new technology silo in an IT environment can increase complexity, requiring more time for routine tasks, additional headcount, and more training. In contrast, building a social-enterprise environment with an integrated approach brings new value to existing technology assets and optimizes established IT resources. Integrating enterprise social software into the established infrastructure stack of content management, directory, database, , corporate Intranet, and other platforms can significantly streamline operations for IT. This paper will discuss the cost and operational advantages of tightly integrating enterprise social platforms with existing IT infrastructure, such as the Microsoft stack, and its impact on enhancing ROI. Advantages include: Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO): Enterprise social platforms that integrate tightly with user data and profiles, security and governance, indexing, search, administration, and management within platforms already familiar to IT personnel drive down the total cost of ownership. Harness Human Capital: Existing training and certifications can be leveraged across both the enterprise social and IT domains, and the time required for routine support tasks can be substantially reduced. Using existing IT talent eliminates the expense of recruiting, on-boarding and retaining staff dedicated to enterprise social software. Enhance Security, Compliance, and Governance: IT s familiarity with existing toolsets enhances security, compliance and governance capabilities, which rank among the top concerns of enterprise leaders investigating social technologies. CONTENTS Frost.com 3

4 Frost & Sullivan THE VALUE OF A SOCIAL ENTERPRISE Social software is gaining a lot of attention in the enterprise technology industry. Users of consumer social networking tools expect to have the same, or better, collaboration and search capabilities in the workplace as they have in their personal life. Enterprise leaders also recognize social software s potential to harness user-driven content in order to enhance communication and collaboration across groups, departments, business units, and employees company-wide. Therefore, enterprise leaders are looking to empower their employees with secure, compliant, scalable, and reliable social functionality that allows them to work faster and smarter. The increasingly high level of interest has resulted in an exhaustive array of social solutions available to enterprises today. These range from point products to comprehensive suites, from consumer-grade, freemium platforms to robust, enterprise-class toolsets. At first glance, there appears to be feature parity across most of the comprehensive enterprise-class solutions. Capabilities such as user profiles, activity streams, microblogs, communities, and enterprise content management integration, presence, chat, and search are supported by most platforms. However, every enterprise has unique requirements, and every enterprise expects their social solution to result in improved business performance and a competitive advantage in their respective markets. Because of this, enterprise decision-makers must evaluate solutions that are extensible, and they must consider attributes beyond the user-facing features, including the operational implications of introducing social software into their IT environments. BUILD WITH AN INTEGRATED APPROACH An organization can become a social business by implementing software that organizes unstructured content, managing the metadata needed to identify and establish the relationships that connect people to people, and people to content. After all, those connections enable the indexing and search capabilities at the heart of any successful social enterprise environment. Unfortunately, it s not enough to just deploy an enterprise-grade social solution and expect it to transform your organization. Smart companies will instead integrate any new social tools with their existing services and applications, making it easier for users and IT staff alike to adopt the new way of working. Indeed, the optimal path to becoming a social enterprise is to leverage existing content, collaborative applications and control mechanisms to effectively deliver new value to previous investments. Any impediment to user adoption, and any added complexities in IT support, will have direct ramifications on TCO and ROI. Integrating social software into an established IT environment has distinct advantages over siloed or bolt-on solutions. An integrated approach enhances existing assets, limits disruption for end users and maximizes available IT resources. 4 Frost.com

5 Not All Enterprise Social Networking Solutions are Created Equal IT BENEFITS Existing IT certifications and training can support new collaboration capabilities. Integration with existing assets provides familiar toolsets to IT, removing complexity and allowing IT to focus on end-user training, adoption, community support, and customization. An integrated approach leverages existing structure and policies to ensure governance, compliance and security. An integrated approach leverages existing content, system and user data, and taxonomy to streamline enterprise social configuration, management, administration and provisioning. Established directories and databases can be employed for end-user identity management, to build end-user profiles and organize unstructured content. Groups and permissions within content management systems can be used to quickly build communities and apply discoverability parameters. END-USER BENEFITS Tight integration with existing applications and established workflows reduces end-user training requirements. Leveraging existing applications provides familiar interfaces, which encourage adoption, utilization, engagement and contribution. Utilizing familiar and established IT applications as the foundation for social capabilities reduces help desk requests, limiting disruption and enhancing end-user productivity. Preserving and adding new value to IT assets reduces initial and ongoing support costs, thus facilitating faster enterprise social software rollout to more end-users across the organization. Tight integration with existing security and identity management frameworks provides single sign-on capabilities that enhance the end-user experience and drive utilization. User data and folksonomy within existing IT infrastructure can be employed to build more dynamic and interactive user profiles, thereby making employee competencies and contributions a more visible asset to the greater organization. INTEGRATION ENHANCES ROI Organizations can optimize their IT resources and avoid additional costs by selecting an enterprise social platform that integrates tightly with existing enterprise , directories, databases, content management, and other IT assets. The number of employees needed to support an enterprise social platform will vary by the size, experience and expertise of the IT organization; the size and sophistication of the deployment; industry priorities; and other factors. Regardless, a typical organization has already invested the time and resources to recruit or train a qualified IT staff. It makes sense to optimize these investments. Frost.com 5

6 Frost & Sullivan Utilize Existing Skill Sets Entry-level online certification classes for SharePoint 2010 cost as little as several hundred dollars per employee, while advanced certifications can cost thousands (based on list pricing from New Horizons in the U.S.). With a multitude of classes and levels required for configuration, administration, management, development, and more, the average enterprise has already substantially invested in these to support its existing IT stack. Adding a new enterprise social software silo that requires additional certifications and training creates an unnecessary and expensive redundancy. Potential savings from cross-leveraging IT certifications are exponentially compounded when the enterprise social platform is aligned to tightly integrate with other elements within the IT stack, such as server operating systems, databases, directories, , desktop productivity applications, and CRM. The average annual salary for a full-time IT manager in the U.S. is approximately $107,064 (as of May 2012 per Salary.com), excluding benefits, recruitment, on-boarding and other typical expenses when adding new employees. Eliminating the need to outsource support or add IT staff to create and maintain an enterprise social environment contributes substantially to shorter ROI. Allocating the same IT personnel that support existing content management and collaboration systems alleviates this requirement. Tightly integrating enterprise social software with the enterprise IT stack can create flexibility in IT resource allocation. Furthermore, an integrated approach mitigates risks associated with IT staff turnover. When an enterprise social platform requires dedicated and specialized expertise, the entire enterprise social environment may be overly dependent on the reliability and employment viability of a select few individuals. Improve IT Productivity The median salary for Microsoft-certified systems engineers, administrators, and IT professionals is $78,697 per year (according to a 2011 IT survey conducted by Global Knowledge and TechRepublic), excluding benefits. This equates to approximately $300 per day. When social software is tightly integrated with enterprise collaboration and content management systems, IT personnel already proficient with the existing toolsets are able to perform tasks within the flow of their other work and thereby faster, with more confidence and more accurately, compared to social platforms requiring wholly separate, dedicated interfaces and tools. Integrated reporting of user activity, content, communities and more with enterprise content management systems streamlines this frequent and potentially time-consuming task. 6 Frost.com

7 Not All Enterprise Social Networking Solutions are Created Equal Utilizing interfaces and applications familiar to end users can significantly reduce help desk requests as well as customization/mac requests from specific departments or communities. IT is then available to focus on higher-value tasks. Reduce Risk, Loss and Legal Ramifications Penalties for non-compliance with customer information protection measures are not trivial. For example, penalties for non-compliance with personal credit information (PCI) levied on banks and credit card companies range from $5,000 to $500,000, and $50 to $90 fine per cardholder data compromised (per Prineta Payment Consulting). Non-compliance with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPPA) regulations to secure patient healthcare information in the U.S. can result in fines of $50,000 per offense. In addition to negative publicity and a damaged brand reputation, penalties such as these detract from ROI and may ultimately jeopardize the success of enterprise social initiatives. Governance is a top concern, as failing to protect data is a leading factor in data theft. It is both effective and efficient for enterprise social platforms to inherit the user profiles and permissions already available with enterprise content management and user data stores. The security frameworks within familiar and trusted enterprise platforms such as Active Directory, SharePoint and SQL enable IT administrators to centrally control user access to content across the infrastructure. Such practices reduce the potential for human error compared with manually provisioning user permissions separately on each IT and social software component. API integrations with other platforms (storage, libraries, repositories, etc.) can enhance data retention, enabling organizations to securely retain larger amounts of data over longer timeframes, intelligently index, and retrieve content as required for compliance and auditing concerns. Companies must ensure they secure their data. The frequency of cybercrime is increasing daily, making it a priority for enterprises to keep their end-users inside the firewall when searching for and sharing information. A 2010 Canadian government report asserted that 86 percent of large Canadian companies had been targets of cyber espionage and that efforts to steal intellectual property from the private sector had doubled since The UK estimates that cyber network attacks targeting the private sector cost British businesses $34 billion per year, and 40 percent of attacks are aimed at stealing company secrets, such as designs, formulas, and other types of intellectual property. With a single user management, identity and directory toolset, such as Active Directory, enterprise social end users authenticate across the IT domain, allowing them to invoke the specific applications they need without the disruption of authenticating on each platform separately. Single sign-on enforcement eases security measures for IT when compared to Frost.com 7

8 Frost & Sullivan authentication dedicated to each platform. For example, help desk requests for locked-out end users decrease, while parameters for pass code syntax and frequency of pass code changes can be standardized. Simplify Customization and Improve Agility Tight integration with the existing IT software stack streamlines initial configuration, deployment, ongoing maintenance and customization of enterprise social software. Out-of-the-box enterprise social software compatibility with enterprise infrastructure means that IT can create and provision communities based on groups and distribution lists already established in content management and systems. Federated user identity across the IT and enterprise social domains enhances user management, security and provisioning of features to specific personnel. Federated identity also gives end users a single profile across all applications. Available APIs provide enterprise social software extensibility and cost-effective customization in order to address a greater variety of use cases (such as CRM, ERP, social media, and other integrations) across the organization, while presenting a common platform for IT to support. These hooks can reduce or eliminate the need to outsource development. Using development and control frameworks within existing IT platforms, along with out-of-the-box integrations and available APIs, serves to speed the customization, modification and rollout of new capabilities, making the organization more agile and responsive to changing business requirements. CONCLUSION Decision-makers have plenty of options when it comes to choosing an enterprise social software platform. But not all enterprise social software is created equal. The interplay between social platforms and the larger IT infrastructure has a direct effect on ROI. The operational impact of implementing enterprise social software is often overlooked, but it is a critical consideration. The complexities and costs associated with adding new silos to the IT environment add to TCO and decrease ROI. Organizations that want to become successful social enterprises are advised to take an integrated approach when implementing social software, which adds value, not complexity. Such an approach effectively leverages existing IT infrastructure and personnel resources, and eliminates the need for additional operational expenses associated with disparate toolsets dedicated to siloed social platforms. The efficiencies of using familiar frameworks for configuration, management, administration, security, and provisioning will enhance a core metric of success ROI. 8 Frost.com

9 Silicon Valley 331 E. Evelyn Ave. Suite 100 Mountain View, CA Tel Fax San Antonio 7550 West Interstate 10, Suite 400, San Antonio, Texas Tel Fax London 4, Grosvenor Gardens, London SWIW ODH,UK Tel 44(0) Fax 44(0) GoFrost ABOUT FROST & SULLIVAN Frost & Sullivan, the Growth Partnership Company, partners with clients to accelerate their growth. The company s TEAM Research, Growth Consulting, and Growth Team Membership empower clients to create a growth-focused culture that generates, evaluates, and implements effective growth strategies. Frost & Sullivan employs over 50 years of experience in partnering with Global 1000 companies, emerging businesses, and the investment community from more than 40 offices on six continents. For more information about Frost & Sullivan s Growth Partnership Services, visit For information regarding permission, write: Frost & Sullivan 331 E. Evelyn Ave. Suite 100 Mountain View, CA Auckland Bangkok Beijing Bengaluru Bogotá Buenos Aires Cape Town Chennai Colombo Delhi / NCR Dhaka Dubai Frankfurt Hong Kong Istanbul Jakarta Kolkata Kuala Lumpur London Mexico City Milan Moscow Mumbai Manhattan Oxford Paris Rockville Centre San Antonio São Paulo Seoul Shanghai Silicon Valley Singapore Sophia Antipolis Sydney Taipei Tel Aviv Tokyo Toronto Warsaw Washington, DC