Majority of Social Collaboration Initiatives Fail Due to Lack of Purpose: Gartner


Bangalore: Although social technologies are employed by 70 percent of organizations, Gartner said most social collaboration initiatives fail because they follow a worst practice approach of "provide and pray", leading to a 10 percent success rate.

"Without a well-crafted and compelling purpose, most social media initiatives will fail to deliver business value," said Anthony Bradley, group vice president at Gartner. "This provides and prays approach provides access to a social collaboration technology and prays something comes good of it, like a community forming and participants' interactions naturally delivering business value. As a result, this approach sees a 10 percent success rate, and the underlying reason is usually that the organization did not provide a compelling cause around which a community could form and be motivated to provide their time and knowledge. In other words, purpose was lacking."

Gartner's research into the social collaboration efforts of more than 1,000 organizations has identified several prominent patterns. The most apparent was that social collaboration initiatives that have a clear and compelling purpose from the outset tend to succeed. While this may seem obvious, the vast majority of organizations treat collaboration as a platform decision, rather than a solution to a specific business problem or a route to a desired outcome.

“Organizations approaching social collaboration in the "provide and pray" manner do not fully recognize the value of purpose and do not understand how to take an "architected" approach to it,” said Bradley. “Social collaboration efforts are a challenge for which enterprise architects are well suited, as these practitioners are often cross-disciplinary. They are able to work with social initiative leaders to define community purposes and condense these purposes into a strategy or road map which they can use to guide project teams during implementation.”

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