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Editor’s note: Josep Vilajoana Celaya is Dean of the Col·legi Oficial de Psicòlegs de Catalunya (Official College of Psychologists of Catalonia), an institution that has just implemented its own enterprise social network. He has been kind enough to write this post for our ZyncroBlog. Thanks, Josep, for your contribution!
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We follow trends and at the same time, we treat them with certain distain, dubbing them as “simply a craze”. Generally speaking, companies are late in joining the trends. However, any company that gets in on the bottom floor and is one of the first to sign up for what later becomes a major trend possesses a major source of differentiation, something that many others struggle tool and nail to achieve.
Enterprise social networks seemed to be a craze at first, but now we can see that they are here to stay and companies are starting to consider incorporating them in their internal management systems. Statistics seem to indicate that up until now, only major corporations were experimenting with the idea. But what can we learn from them? Well, the usual idea: anything that addresses a real need has greater possibilities of lasting over time, at least until a new innovation covers that need or the market evolves, making that need vanish.
Possibly, due to needs, the environment that we now call “Social Networks” will be reorganized shortly. Now tools have been merged, with purposes as different as those sought with walls, microblogging, blogs, wikis, and even instant messaging, chats, video conferences, that undoubtedly were not created as networks initially, but that help to improve relationships.
One of the key points for the success of an enterprise social network lies in having tools that focus on a specific goal, an aim that should be measurable and aligned with the organization’s objectives and strategies.
There’s much debate regarding the importance of anonymity when this should equally respond to the characteristics of use made of the networks. In some cases, anonymity may be necessary. However, on the other hand, if the purpose is to generate innovative ideas, more than likely in most of these cases, such anonymity is an obstacle and those that use enterprise social networks for this purpose would prefer that the whole organization, even those beyond its walls, knew who the author of the idea is.
At Col·legi Oficial de Psicòlegs de Catalunya, we’ve made a firm committment to combining ideas, and encouraging innovation and relationships through our enterprise social network. There, different sections of our association can discover the evolution in Society’s needs in real time, suggest solutions, investigate and innovate together and of course, communicate the results of their work to the rest of the community. In short, an enterprise social network is a space for relationships, leading to promote knowledge transfer.
Now more than ever, sharing what you know is key to quickly adapting to changes.
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