Over 90% of organizations have some kind of social network running internally. As the co-founder of Elgg, one of the first internal social networking solutions, I find this gratifying: 12 years ago, few people saw the potential for social technology beyond personal blogging and sharing.
Unfortunately, too many organizations choose to purchase an enterprise social solution with a Field of Dreams mentality: "if you build it, they will come". On the contrary, as Harvard Business Review noted recently:
The reality is that the landscape is littered with failed technology deployments. Altimeter’s research shows that less than half of the enterprise collaboration tools installed have many employees using them regularly.
When we work with higher education, we're keen to point out that technology should support teaching, and not the other way around (a curriculum shouldn't be moulded around the capabilities of your technology). The same is true in organizations: the way your enterprise functions should be in tune with your business goals, rather than the software you happen to be using.
Forcing people to use an internal social platform is counter-intuitive. Instead, it makes sense to provide a platform that supports you when you need it, in a flexible way. That means it's got to be simple, support ad-hoc use, but allow you to keep your activity around in case you need to refer to it later. Many organizations also require the ability to audit activity.
If you just need to create a one-off simple space to bring up to 200 people in to discuss a project either privately or publicly, you can use Known Pro. $10 for up to 200 users with unlimited storage and bandwidth is hard to beat. Signing up and inviting your users in takes less than three minutes. (I know: I've timed it countless times.)
If you're the kind of firm that needs to run social spaces on your own infrastructure, for compliance or legislative reasons, Known can provide this too. We can also run Known on a fully-managed private cloud for you.
We can also create a system for your organization that allows you to create unlimited social discussion spaces, all linked to your existing accounts via Single Sign On (in education, we use LTI; in enterprise, LDAP and Shibboleth are available). You can easily keep track of all the project spaces that have been created, and you can control access individually - which means you can invite people from outside your organization to help with a project, on a project-by-project basis.
It's completely customizable, flexible, easy-to-use, and mobile-first. We're proud to give you full control over your data and discussions.
To learn more about how Known can help your enterprise, get in touch.