The Project Wall Blog

McKinsey has published a report that illustrates the relationship between social technology use and organizational performance, with some interesting results. McKinsey looks at organizations as achieving different levels of social networking: developing, internally networked, externally networked, and fully networked. The names are pretty self explanatory.

McKinsey found significant, positive correlations between the presence of social business technologies and business performance. Specifically, they found significantly better performance in companies that are increasing their level of integration of social technologies into day-to-day work year over year.

Even so, of the 3000+ companies surveyed, more than 2400 are still in what is called the “developing” category, and only 110 have reached the state of “fully networked”. Most likely many companies choose to focus on internal or external networking, rather than both, so the small number isn’t that surprising. What is more troubling is the finding that companies are not maintaining positive trajectories in their social business implementations.

McKinsey found that, of the companies that had previously reached some level of networking benefits, over half had lost the previously achieved gains and had slid back to the “developing” category.  While many of the statistics that are in the report are similar across categories, one that is extremely different is the level of integration of the social technology into the every day work of the company. In companies that have reached a level of networking value, at least 45% of the companies reported very high levels of integration into the daily work of the company. In developing companies, that number is only 18%.

This highlights and confirms a point we have made in the past. Social networking platform investments are only the first step. What multiplies the value and usefulness of a social platform is the integration of business processes into the social platform – via technologies like ProjExec.

So, while companies may begin to become networked using platforms, continued and consistent integration of the processes of the business into the social platform of the organization is needed to continue the trajectory of social adoption and value generation.

Social project management is an excellent entry point for social business, and ProjExec is that entry point if you’re on the the IBM Social Business platforms – IBM Connections and the IBM SmartCloud.

ProjExec. Projects. Made Social.