The Social Organization: How to Use Social Media to Tap the Collective Genius of Your Customers and Employees

As a leader, it's your job to extract maximum talent, energy, knowledge, and innovation from your customers and employees. But how?

In The Social Organization, two of Gartner's lead analysts strongly advocate exploiting social technology. The authors share insights from their study of successes and failures at more than four hundred organizations that have used social technologies to foster—and capitalize on—customers and employees collective efforts.

But the new social technology landscape isnt about the technology. Its about building communities, fostering new ways of collaborating, and guiding these efforts to achieve a purpose. To that end, the authors identify the core disciplines managers must master to translate community collaboration into otherwise impossible results:

• Vision: defining a compelling vision of progress toward a highly collaborative organization.

• Strategy: taking community collaboration from risky and random success to measurable business value.

• Purpose: rallying people around a clear purpose, not just providing technology.

• Launch: creating a collaborative environment and gaining adoption.

• Guide: participating in and influencing communities without stifling collaboration.

• Adapt: responding creatively to change in order to better support community collaboration.

The Social Organization highlights the benefits and challenges of using social technology to tap the power of people, revealing what managers must do to make collaboration a source of enduring competitive advantage.

Anthony Bradley is a group vice president in Gartner Research, managing teams that cover business process management, project and portfolio management, enterprise architecture, IT procurement, IT sourcing, and vendor management. He also advises clients on the enterprise employment of social media and social software solutions. Prior to Gartner, Mr. Bradley led several SOA and Web 2.0 projects with Booz Allen Hamilton in the IT Innovations Group. He assisted the U.S. Army in applying SOA to transform its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capability to enable net-centric warfare. He led a systems design effort for the Army Knowledge Online (AKO) proposal, bringing the concepts and technologies of social software and SOA to Army enterprise collaboration. Mr. Bradley also consulted with Toyota, British Petroleum, Shell Oil, Independence Blue Cross and the MTA of New York City on SOA and Web 2.0 efforts. Prior to Booz Allen, he was the CTO and co-founder of Appergy, a Silicon Valley startup delivering social collaboration solutions.

Mark McDonald, Ph.D., is a group vice president and head of research in Gartner Executive Programs. He is responsible for the research agenda focused exclusively on CIOs and the business of information technology. Mr. McDonald is the lead author of research in the areas of CIO credibility, the business use of advanced technologies, enterprise architecture and business process transformation. He is the co-author with Peter Keen of "The eProcess Edge" and the author of "Architecting Enterprises - Achieving Performance and Flexibility." Prior to joining Gartner, Mr. McDonald was a partner at Accenture, where he was responsible for the Center for Process Excellence and methodology.