How CIOs and Other IT Leaders Can Enable Social Business

When she visited the Socialware offices recently, former Salesforce.com CIO and current Socialware advisor Kirsten Wolberg made a simple but crucial observation about the role of any CIO in helping his or her company embrace social media—and social business practices:

“Social is a shared service that’s used across the enterprise. As such, the CIO is responsible for being the integrator of those solutions.”

Wolberg also talked about how often CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and other IT leaders are “at the nexus of saying ‘No’,” and how refreshing it can be to be able to say “Yes” to new initiatives or tools that enable better business outcomes—especially in cutting-edge areas like social.

IT as a Leader, Not a Follower, in Social Business

For more perspective on this, I talked with Ken Burbary, a technologist who serves as Vice President and Group Director for Strategy and Analysis at the global agency Digitas. His work puts him in touch with business leaders across different industries who are grappling with the implementation—and the implications—of social business practices.

“IT has a key role in all of these amazing and disruptive innovations. The days of command and control IT are waning, if not over, in most companies. So how can the CIO stay relevant to the business? By clearly articulating how to help internal clients be successful in achieving their goals by leveraging social technologies.”

Burbary is quick to acknowledge that this doesn’t change the IT organization’s dedication to maintaining traditional responsibilities for security, data integrity, and so on. But the approach has to be collaborative. “I’ve found IT departments that try to extend the command and control mentality into business units that are looking to be more agile and leverage disruptive technologies like social fail—they fail miserably and just get shut out and worked around.”

Avoiding the Risk of “Crowdsourced IT”

Burbary’s point was echoed by Adam Cohen, Senior Vice President for Digital and Social Media at Fleishman-Hillard. Cohen, who spent years helping major enterprises implement back-office systems, highlighted the connections between security, risk mitigation, and “crowdsourced IT.”

“If IT says no to an idea sponsored by a business unit without supplying better alternatives, employees may simply go outside the constraints of IT,” Cohen said. “Technology has changed, and people can get a lot done without involving IT if they want to.” Especially in financial services, he added, “employees talking about anything on social networks in an unsupervised or unstructured way is a risk.” In his view, these factors imply that “it’s actually riskier for an IT department not to be involved in social media.”

Again, IT organizations that embrace this viewpoint can become enablers of positive business outcomes for other areas of the company including marketing, compliance, and sales.

CIOs Look to Emerging Best Practices for Social Business

The good news is that you don’t need to go it alone. Flagship enterprises in financial services and other industries are establishing best practices to embrace the social technologies that provide a competitive advantage and improve internal and client-facing operations while maintaining compliance.

These best practices, which we will continue to discuss in future posts, allow IT departments to move away from “the nexus of saying ‘No’.” We’re here to share what we and our partners have learned from enterprises and IT departments across the industry.

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