Leading the Epic Revolution: How CIOs Drive Innovation and Create Value Across the Enterprise

Chapter 8

Leveraging Social Collaboration to Drive Innovation

In the minds of many CIOs, the term “social collaboration” will always be closely associated with the term “social media,” which inevitably evokes thoughts of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and other social networks.

For CIOs, social networks seem inextricably linked to a multitude of tangible business challenges, ranging from security risks to time management issues. As a result, many CIOs tend to approach the whole idea of social collaboration with a certain degree of reluctance.

While this reluctance is quite understandable, it also can be harmful. The overwhelming majority of millennials have grown up with social media. To them, social media feels totally natural—it is an inseparable part of their lives and they aren't going to let go of it anytime soon.

It is not just millennials who are attached to social media. I am going to quote verbatim some key findings from a recent Nielsen report:

• Social networks and blogs continue to dominate Americans' time online, now accounting for nearly a quarter of total time spent on the Internet.
• Social media has grown rapidly—today nearly four in five active Internet users visit social networks and blogs.
• Americans spend more time on Facebook than they do on any other U.S. website.
• Close to 40 percent of social media users access social media content from their mobile phone.
• Social networking apps are the third most used among U.S. smartphone owners.

Take a moment to review the ...